willpower, like a muscle, becomes fatigued from overuse but can also be strengthened over the long term through exercise. (loc 80)

people with good self-control mainly use it not for rescue in emergencies but rather to develop effective habits and routines in school and at work. The results of these habits and routines were demonstrated in yet another recent set of studies, in the United States, showing that people with high self-control consistently report less stress in their lives. They use their self-control not to get through crises but to avoid them. (loc 3464)

Your supply of willpower is limited, and you use the same resource for many different things. (loc 3530)

Virtually no one has a gut-level sense of just how tiring it is to decide. Choosing what to have for dinner, where to go on vacation, whom to hire, how much to spend—these all take willpower. Even hypothetical decisions deplete energy. After making some tough decisions, remember that your self-control is going to be weakened. Remember, too, that what matters is the exertion, not the outcome. If you struggle with temptation and then give in, you're still depleted because you struggled. (loc 3540)

When you're budgeting your time, don't give drudgery more than its necessary share. Remember Parkinson's Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Set a firm time limit for tedious tasks. "Clean out basement" or "Reorganize closets" could take up the whole day—if you ever got around to it, which you won't because you don't want to lose a day of your life to something so mundane. But if you set a clear limit of one or two hours, you might get something done this Saturday (loc 3600)

Another simple old-fashioned way to boost your willpower is to expend a little of it on neatness. As we described in chapter 7, people exert less self-control after seeing a messy desk than after seeing a clean desk, or when using a sloppy rather than a neat and wellorganized Web site. You may not care about whether your bed is made and your desk is clean, but these environmental cues subtly influence your brain and your behavior, making it ultimately less of a strain to maintain self-discipline. (loc 3651)

Procrastination is usually a vice, but occasionally—very occasionally—there is such a thing as positive procrastination. In the previous chapter we discussed experiments showing that people tempted by chocolate managed to avoid it by telling themselves they'd eat it some other time—a postponement strategy that worked better than trying to deny themselves altogether. This "I'll have it later" trick can work for other temptations, too. If a TV show is keeping you from getting back to work, record it and tell yourself you'll finish watching it later. (loc 3661)

Monitoring is crucial for any kind of plan you make—and it can even work if you don't make a plan at all. (loc 3707)

When you set a goal, set a reward for reaching it—and then don't stiff yourself. If you just use willpower to deny yourself things, it becomes a grim, thankless form of defense. But when you use it to gain something, you can wring pleasure out of the dreariest tasks. (loc 3721)

Freud, who theorized that the self depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. But Freud's energy model of the self was generally ignored by subsequent researchers. (loc 135)

"ego depletion," Baumeister's term for describing people's diminished capacity to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and actions. People can sometimes overcome mental fatigue, but Baumeister found that if they had used up energy by exerting willpower (or by making decisions, another form of ego depletion that we'll discuss later), they would eventually succumb. […]
while depleted persons (once again) didn't show any single telltale emotion, they did react more strongly to all kinds of things. A sad movie made them extra sad. Joyous pictures made them happier, and disturbing pictures made them more frightened and upset. Ice-cold water felt more painful to them than it did to people who were not ego-depleted. Desires intensified along with feelings. (loc 479)

ego depletion causes a slowdown in the anterior cingulate cortex, the brain area that's crucial to self-control. As the brain slows down and its error-detection ability deteriorates, people have trouble controlling their reactions.
…
There's no obvious "feeling" of depletion. Hence you need to watch yourself for subtle, easily misinterpreted signs. Do things seem to bother you more than they should? Has the volume somehow been turned up on your life so that things are felt more strongly than usual? Is it suddenly hard to make up your mind about even simple things? Are you more than usually reluctant to make a decision or exert yourself mentally or physically? If you notice such feelings, then reflect on the last few hours and see if it seems likely that you have depleted your willpower. If so, try to conserve what's left while anticipating the effects on your behavior. (loc 3550)

"Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss," Ariely says. Sometimes that makes sense, but too often we're so eager to keep options open that we don't see the long-term price that we're paying—or that others are paying. When you won't settle for less than a perfect mate, you end up with no one. (loc 1491)

Decision making is stressful

When your willpower is low, you're less able to make these trade-offs. You become what researchers call a "cognitive miser," hoarding your energy by avoiding compromises. You're liable to look at only one dimension, like price: Just give me the cheapest. (loc 1504)

When a psychiatrist testifying for the defense cited White's consumption of Twinkies and other junk food in the days before the murders, journalists mocked White for trying to excuse himself with a "Twinkie defense." In fact, White's chief defense wasn't based on the argument that the Twinkies turned him murderous by causing his blood-sugar levels to quickly spike and then crash. His attorneys argued that he deserved mercy because he suffered from "diminished capacity" due to severe depression, and they presented his junk-food consumption (along with other changes in habits) as evidence of his depression, (loc 681)

One study found below-average glucose levels in 90 percent of the juvenile delinquents recently taken into custody. Other studies reported that people with hypoglycemia were more likely to be convicted of a wide variety of offenses: traffic violations, public profanity, shoplifting, destruction of property, exhibitionism, public masturbation, embezzlement, arson, spouse abuse, and child abuse. (loc 688)

The effects of the drinks showed up clearly in a study of aggression among people playing a computer game. At first, the game seemed reasonable, but it soon became impossibly difficult. Everyone got frustrated as the game went on, but the one who got a sugar-filled drink managed to grumble quietly and keep playing. The others started cursing aloud and banging the computer. (loc 736)

As the body uses glucose during self-control, it starts to crave sweet things to eat—which is bad news for people hoping to use their self-control to avoid sweets. When people have more demands for self-control in their daily lives, their hunger for sweets increases. It's not a simple matter of wanting all food more—they seem to be specifically hungry for sweets. In the lab, students who have just performed a self-control task eat more sweet snacks but not other (salty) snacks. (loc 771)

PMS, like hypoglycemia and diabetes, makes a conveniently clear-cut example of what happens when the body is short of glucose—and everyone, male or female, diabetic or nondiabetic, runs low on glucose at times (loc 851)

To maintain steady self-control, you're better off eating foods with a low glycemic index: most vegetables, nuts (like peanuts and cashews), many raw fruits (like apples, blueberries, and pears), cheese, fish, meat, olive oil, and other "good" fats. (loc 885)

Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted and more prone to serious mistakes later. When people have to make a big change in their lives, their efforts are undermined if they are trying to make other changes as well. (loc 588)

The result of conflicting goals is unhappiness instead of action, (loc 988)

see Hamlet.

It might seem that people who think more about their goals would also take more steps to reach them, but instead they replace action with rumination. The researchers found that people with clear, unconflicting goals tended to forge ahead and make progress, but the rest were so busy worrying that they got stuck. (loc 996)

people with conflicting goals reported fewer positive emotions, more negative emotions, and more depression and anxiety. They had more psychosomatic complaints and symptoms. Even just plain physical sickness, measured both by the number of visits to the doctor and by the number of self-reported illnesses over the course of a year, was higher among the people with conflicting goals. The more the goals conflicted, the more the people got stuck, and the more unhappy and unhealthy they became. (loc 999)

The group with the proximal goals outperformed everyone else when the program was over and competence was tested. They succeeded, apparently, because meeting these daily goals gradually built their confidence and self-efficacy. With their focus on a specific goal for each session, they learned better and faster than the others. (loc 1041)

Something to be said about greedy optimisation

The monthly planning group did the best, in terms of improvements in study habits and attitudes. Among the weaker students (though not among the good ones), monthly planning led to much bigger improvements in grades than did the daily planning. Monthly planners also kept it up much longer than the daily planners, and the continued planning thus was more likely to carry over into their work after the program ended. (loc 1067)

Those who'd written about unfulfilled tasks had more trouble keeping their minds focused on the novel—unless they'd made a specific plan to complete the task, in which case they reported relatively little mind wandering and scored quite well on the reading comprehension test. Even though they hadn't finished the task or made any palpable progress, the simple act of making a plan had cleared their minds and eliminated the Zeigarnik effect. (loc 1230)

By overriding their habit of slouching, the students strengthened their willpower and did better at tasks that had nothing to do with posture. The improvement was most pronounced among the students who had followed the advice most diligently (as measured by the daily logs the students kept of how often they'd forced themselves to sit up or stand up straight). (loc 1909)

Exercising self-control in one area seemed to improve all areas of life. (loc 1976)
…
But as of this morning, you're not dead yet. There's no food in camp, but at least you're alive. Now that you've arisen and taken care of nature's first call of the morning, what's the next thing to do? For Stanley, this was an easy decision: shave. As one of his servants in England would later recall: "He had often told me that, on his various expeditions, he had made it a rule, always to shave carefully. In the Great Forest, in 'Starvation Camp,' on the mornings of battle, he had never neglected this custom, however great the difficulty; he told me he had often shaved with cold water, or with blunt razors." (loc 2250)

Murakami: in every shave lies a philosophy

Stanley's belief in the link between external order and inner self-discipline has been confirmed recently in some remarkable studies. In one experiment, a group of participants answered questions sitting in a nice neat laboratory room, while others sat in the kind of place that inspires parents to shout, "Clean up your room!" The people in the messy room scored lower in self-control on many measures, such as being unwilling to wait a week for a larger sum of money as opposed to taking a smaller sum right away. (loc 2262)

The page-a-day folks had done well and generally gotten tenure. The so-called "binge writers" fared far less well, and many had had their careers cut short. The clear implication was that the best advice for young writers and aspiring professors is: Write every day. Use your self-control to form a daily habit, and you'll produce more with less effort in the long run. (loc 2303)

If you're in a religious congregation and ask God for longer life, you are likely to get it. It doesn't even seem to matter which god you ask. Any sort of religious activity increases your longevity,
[…]
Religious people are less likely than others to develop unhealthy habits, like getting drunk, engaging in risky sex, taking illicit drugs, and smoking cigarettes. They're more likely to wear seat belts, visit a dentist, and take vitamins. They have better social support, and their faith helps them cope psychologically with misfortunes. And they have better self-control, (loc 2594)

The strongest evidence yet was published in 2010. In a painstaking long-term study, much larger and more thorough than anything done previously, an international team of researchers tracked one thousand children in New Zealand from birth until the age of thirty-two. Each child's self-control was rated in a variety of ways (through observations by researchers as well as in reports of problems from parents, teachers, and the children themselves). This produced an especially reliable measure of children's self-control, and the researchers were able to check it against an extraordinarily wide array of outcomes through adolescence and into adulthood. The children with high self-control grew up into adults who had better physical health, including lower rates of obesity, fewer sexually transmitted diseases, and even healthier teeth. (Apparently, good self-control includes brushing and flossing.) (loc 236)

Yes, students with higher self-esteem did have higher grades. But which came first? Did students' self-esteem lead to good grades, or did good grades lead to self-esteem? It turned out that grades in tenth grade predicted self-esteem in twelfth grade, but self-esteem in tenth grade failed to predict grades in twelfth grade. Thus, it seemed, the grades came first, and the self-esteem came afterward. (loc 2757)

In another carefully controlled study, Donald Forsyth tried boosting the self-esteem of some of the students in his psychology class at Virginia Commonwealth University. He randomly assigned some students who got a C grade or worse on the midterm to receive a weekly message boosting their self-esteem, and some students with similar grades to get a neutral weekly message. The weekly pep talks presumably helped the students feel better about themselves, but it didn't help their grades—quite to the contrary. When they took the final exam, not only did they do worse than the control group but their grades were even lower than what they'd gotten on the midterm. Their average score dropped from 59 to 39—from borderline passing down to hopeless. (loc 2759)

There seem to be only two clearly demonstrated benefits of high self-esteem, according to the review panel. First, it increases initiative, probably because it lends confidence. People with high self-esteem are more willing to act on their beliefs, to stand up for what they believe in, to approach others, to risk new undertakings. (This unfortunately includes being extra willing to do stupid or destructive things, even when everyone else advises against them.) Second, it feels good. High self-esteem seems to operate like a bank of positive emotions, which furnish a general sense of well-being and can be useful when you need an extra dose of confidence to cope with misfortune, (loc 2782)

Narcissists are legends in their own mind and addicted to their grandiose images. They have a deep craving to be admired by other people (but don't feel a special need to be liked—it's adulation they require). They expect to be treated as special beings and will turn nasty when criticized. They tend to make very good first impressions but don't wear well. When the psychologist Delroy Paulhus asked people in groups to rate one another, the narcissists seemed to be everyone's favorite person, but only during the first few meetings. After a few months, they usually slipped to the bottom of the rankings. (loc 2790)

This broad rise in narcissism is the problem child of the self-esteem movement, and it is not likely to change anytime soon, because the movement persists despite the evidence that it's not making children become more successful, honest, or otherwise better citizens. (loc 2801)

There's one notable exception to the trend toward narcissism observed in psychological studies of young Americans. It doesn't appear among young Asian-Americans, probably because their parents have been influenced less by the self-esteem movement than by a cultural tradition of instilling discipline. […]
After carefully reviewing IQ studies, Flynn concludes that the scores of Chinese-American and Japanese-American people are very similar to whites of European descent. If anything, the Asian-Americans' IQ is slightly lower, on average, although they do show up more at both the upper and lower extremes. The big difference is that they make better use of their intelligence. (loc 2822)

there are three basic facets of punishment: severity, speed, and consistency. Many people associate strict discipline with severe penalties, but that's actually the least important facet. Researchers have found that severity seems to matter remarkably little and can even be counterproductive: Instead of encouraging virtue, harsh punishments teach the child that life is cruel and that aggression is appropriate. (loc 2892)

children react well when reprimands are delivered briefly, calmly, and consistently (loc 2904)

Besides resenting the unfairness, you learn that the most important thing is not how you behave but whether or not you get caught, and whether your parents are in the mood to punish. You might learn, for instance, that table manners can be dispensed with at restaurants, because the grown-ups are too embarrassed to discipline you in public. (loc 2910)

Research has shown that children who open bank accounts are more likely than others to grow up to be savers. So are children who grow up discussing money with their parents. (loc 2964)

The researchers gave it a formal scientific term, counterregulatory eating, but in their lab and among colleagues it was known simply as the what-the-hell effect. Dieters have a fixed target in mind for their maximum daily calories, and when they exceed it for some unexpected reason, such as being given a pair of large milkshakes in an experiment, they regard their diet as blown for the day. (loc 3207)

Humans are born with an innate gift for eating just the right amount. When an infant's body needs food, it sends a signal through hunger pangs. When the body has had enough food, the infant doesn't want to eat any more. Unfortunately, children start to lose this ability by the time they enter school, and it continues to decline later in life (loc 3223)

The researchers found that there was no connection between the women's moods and their eating: The ones who were sadder after the movie didn't eat extra ice cream to drown their sorrows. What mattered was not their mood but rather their will. The dieters who had suppressed emotions during the movie had a much harder time suppressing their appetite. (loc 3255)

Sweet food becomes especially hard to resist because, as we've already seen, self-control depletes the glucose in the bloodstream. If you've ever been on a diet and found yourself unable to shake those intrusive cravings for chocolate or ice cream, this is more than a matter of repressed desires coming back to haunt you. There is a sound physiological basis. (loc 3282)

The result suggests that telling yourself I can have this later operates in the mind a bit like having it now. It satisfies the craving to some degree—and can be even more effective at suppressing the appetite than actually eating the treat.
[…]
It takes willpower to turn down dessert, but apparently it's less stressful on the mind to say Later rather than Never. In the long run, you end up wanting less and also consuming less. (loc 3436)

The shift in people's characters was noticed by a psychoanalyst named Allen Wheelis, who in the late 1950s revealed what he considered a dirty little secret of his profession: Freudian therapies no longer worked the way they were supposed to. In his landmark book, The Quest for Identity, Wheelis described a change in character structure since Freud's day. The Victorian middle-class citizens who formed the bulk of Freud's patients had intensely strong wills, making it difficult for therapists to break through their ironclad defenses and their sense of what was right and wrong. Freud's therapies had concentrated on ways to break through and let them see why they were neurotic and miserable, because once those people achieved insight, they could change rather easily. (loc 159)

Experts surmise that the smartest nonhuman primates can mentally project perhaps twenty minutes into the future—long enough to let the alpha male eat, but not long enough for much planning beyond dinner. (loc 275)

the classic Stroop task (named after psychologist James Stroop), requiring them to say what color some letters are printed in. […]
the Stroop task became a tool for American intelligence officials during the cold war. A covert agent could claim not to speak Russian, but he'd take longer to answer correctly when looking at Russian words for colors. (loc 462)

Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, when people prepare for a season of fasting and self-sacrifice by shamelessly indulging their desires. (loc 622)

Men who saw photos of hot women shifted toward getting an immediate reward instead of waiting for a larger payoff in the future. Apparently, the sight of an attractive woman makes men want cash right away. They focus on the present rather than the future. This effect is probably deeply rooted in the psyche and in the evolutionary past. […]
the sight of an attractive woman (but not an unattractive woman) activates the male brain's nucleus accumbens, which is connected to the part of the brain activated by rewards like cash and sweet-tasting foods. In the past, there might well have been some evolutionary advantage in going for a quick display of resources upon seeing an attractive female; (loc 1564)

Contrary to popular stereotype, alcohol doesn't increase your impulse to do stupid or destructive things; instead, it simply removes restraints. It lessens self-control in two ways: by lowering blood glucose and by reducing self-awareness. Therefore, it mainly affects behaviors marked by inner conflict, as when part of you wants to do something and part of you does not, (loc 2440)

Before heading down that river, Stanley wrote to his fiancée, telling her that he weighed just 118 pounds, having lost 60 pounds since seeing her. His many ailments included another bout of malaria, which had him shivering on a day when the temperature in the sun hit 138 degrees Fahrenheit. He expected worse hardships ahead, but he didn't focus on them in the last letter he would be able to dispatch until reaching the other side of Africa. "My love towards you is unchanged, you are my dream, my stay, my hope, and my beacon," he wrote to her. "I shall cherish you in this light until I meet you, or death meets me." Stanley clung to that hope for another thirty-five hundred miles, taking the Lady Alice down the Congo River, surviving attacks from cannibals chanting a war cry of "Niama! Niama!"—Meat! Meat! Only half of his companions completed the journey to the Atlantic coast, which took nearly three years and claimed the life of every European except Stanley. (loc 2323)

Stanley ended up with a reputation as the harshest and most violent explorer of his age, when in fact he was unusually humane toward Africans, even by comparison with the gentle Livingstone, as Jeal demonstrates. (loc 2359)

This poor body of mine has suffered terribly . . . it has been degraded, pained, wearied & sickened, and has well nigh sunk under the task imposed on it; but this was but a small portion of myself. For my real self lay darkly encased, & was ever too haughty & soaring for such miserable environments as the body that encumbered it daily. (loc 2403)

The view which denies that there is an external world in this sense – that is, which denies that there is a world that is independent of our experience of it – is known as idealism (loc 1706)

Kant agrees with the simple idealist that what we are immediately aware of in sensory experience is not the world itself. Nevertheless, unlike the idealist, he argues that we are required to suppose that there is an external world that gives rise to this sensory experience since, without this supposition, we would not be able to make any sense of such experience. (loc 1736)

We began by noting a distinction between a priori knowledge and empirical knowledge. The former is knowledge that you have gained without having to investigate the world (i.e. armchair knowledge), while the latter is gained, at least in part, via a worldly investigation. An important kind of a priori knowledge is gained by introspection, which is where we 'look inwardly' and examine our own psychological states rather than 'look outwardly' and investigate the world. As we saw, however, not all introspective knowledge is a priori knowledge. (loc 2237)

any legitimate form of abductive inference will be an abbreviated version of an inductive inference. (loc 2249)

Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again. Popper (attributed) (loc 2354)

judgement passed down by one Judge William Overton in 1982, in a famous ruling known as McLean versus the Arkansas Board of Education. The background to the case was that it had been decreed that creationism should be taught in publicly funded schools in Arkansas alongside evolutionary theory as an alternative scientific account of our origins.
The court case was brought by those unhappy with this development, who argued that creationism is not a scientific proposal but merely the expression of a certain religious view, and hence had no place being taught in a US publicly funded school (since the US constitution forbids the advocacy of religion in publicly funded schools). After hearing the testimony of various parties, including the testimony of several influential philosophers of science, Judge Overton was called upon to give a ruling in this case. (loc 2565)

is bad science thereby pseudo-science? This is a deep point, in that while there is clearly a difference to be drawn between bad science and pseudo-science, the distinction is far from sharp. Indeed, once we acknowledge that genuine science can be done badly, then this raises the question of why we should exclude creationism from the canon of genuine science at all. Why not instead regard it merely as genuine science done in a sub-optimal way (i.e. as bad science, rather than pseudo-science)? (loc 2641)

Kuhn argues for the incommensurability of the new revolutionary scientific theory and the old scientific theory it is replacing. That is, the former is not an adaption of the latter as the 'incremental' view of scientific progress suggests, but rather a radical new way of scientific theorising which has nothing that is clearly in common with the old view. As a result, it is difficult, if not impossible, to compare the two scientific paradigms side by side, since they each constitute radically different ways of scientific theorising, not only in terms of how they respond to the scientific evidence but also in terms of what they take the relevant scientific evidence to be in the first place. (loc 2718)

it calls into question the very idea of scientific progress as the accumulation of scientific knowledge. Notice that if scientific revolutions incorporate such radical theoretical change, then the new scientific knowledge that accrues after the scientific revolution can hardly be thought to be incorporating the body of scientific knowledge constituted by the old scientific theory. (loc 2723)

in the Kuhnian picture, the old scientific paradigm may well be very adept at accommodating the empirical evidence, and relative to this paradigm there may well be no definitive empirical counter-evidence which is fatal to the view. Of course, the new scientific paradigm may have a conception of the scientific evidence on which the old scientific paradigm is refuted, but a paradigm-relative falsification of a theory is quite different from the kind of falsification that Judge Overton had in mind, (loc 2734)

in later life, Kuhn himself seemed to significantly moderate his position. (loc 2746)

[Reformed epistemology]
imagine that one were confronted by someone sceptical about the possibility of perceptual knowledge. Could one offer adequate evidence in support of one's perceptual beliefs that is independent in this way (i.e. which even the sceptic about perceptual knowledge would grant as being good evidence)? Clearly, the natural evidence that one might offer in this regard (i.e. the evidence of one's senses) is disallowed, since this is evidence that is gained via perception itself, the putative source of knowledge which is being called into question.
[…]
Reformed epistemologists claim that if we can make sense of how our innate sensory faculties can, in the right conditions, lead us to rationally held perceptual belief and perceptual knowledge, then we ought to be able to make sense of how a corresponding story can be told about religious belief, such that the believer's innate religious faculty – her sensus divinitatis – can in the right conditions lead her to rationally held religious belief and (if the beliefs so formed are true) religious knowledge. (loc 3032)

If one holds that there are no moral facts, then one is endorsing moral expressivism. Moral expressivism holds that moral statements do not express facts but rather perform a very different role instead (e.g. expressing one's support for a certain action or one's desire to stop certain actions from taking place). (loc 3426)

disagreements can prevent us from having knowledge that we might have otherwise possessed. After all, not everyone's opinion is on a par, and so insofar as we do take disagreements seriously, then we might be in danger of losing knowledge (loc 3508)

Another way that disagreement can destroy genuine knowledge is by being a defeater for that knowledge. A defeater is a consideration that prevents you from having knowledge either by indicating that the reasons for your belief don't sufficiently support the truth of that belief or else by providing you with independent reasons for thinking that the belief is false. (loc 3514)

In particular, unless you are able to acquire further reasons that enable you to discount this defeater, such as grounds to think that the people who think that Riga isn't the capital of Latvia are making some kind of mistake, then this defeater undermines your knowledge, even though the defeater in question isn't true. Notice too that the defeater will undermine your knowledge even if you continue to believe that Riga is the capital of Latvia. (loc 3534)

normative account of ignorance, in that it holds that ignorance involves, in addition to a lack of an epistemic standing, a further claim about how the subject has failed to satisfy a relevant norm. In particular, due to an intellectual failing on her part, she has failed know what she ought to have known, (loc 3924)

Fricker argues that epistemic injustice comes in two forms: hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is concerned with how the existing social structures in place can prevent someone from being able to properly identify their situation, thereby epistemically disadvantaging them. (loc 3973)

Touching the Void is a famous documentary made in 2003. It is a dramatic retelling of a real-life incident involving two mountain climbers who face disaster after one of them has an accident on the mountain Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. One of the most spectacular scenes in the film concerns the moment when the main protagonist has to make a choice between certain death and the unknown. He has fallen deep into the heart of a glacier and is now hanging there in the darkness unable, due to his injuries, to climb out. The choice he is faced with is either to hang there in the darkness until he eventually passes out and dies, or else cut the rope and let himself fall deeper into the darkness of the glacier below him. (loc 2421)

Blackburn, Simon (2005) Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane). A very readable introduction to the issues as regards the philosophy of truth. This is a good place to start if you want to learn more about this topic. (loc 283)
…
Dowden, Bradley & Shwartz, Norman (2006) 'Truth', Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/t/truth.htm. A neat and comprehensive overview of the philosophical discussions regarding truth. Note that it can be a little demanding for the beginner in some places. (loc 301)
…
Annas, Julia (2003) Plato: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press). This is a succinct and very readable introduction to Plato's philosophy (loc 491)
…

Whether the Scholars were from the past or the future was unclear, but they certainly had weapons and vehicles from the future. (loc 65)

The heart of the storm was dark, thick with sand, knotted with wind. Ali's chest tightened. This was it: the pol-e-waqt, the bridge between times. Everyone in his village had heard of such things, but nobody could agree what they were: the work of men, the work of djinn, the work of God. Whatever their origin, some men had learned their secrets. (loc 124)

There is no pol-e-waqt that connects past and future in the same world. Once you cross the bridge, everything changes, including the past." (loc 288)

The inhabitants of the far side were as peaceable as anyone might reasonably wish their neighbors to be, but if their mathematical infrastructure came under threat they faced the real prospect of annihilation. They had defended themselves from such a threat once before, but because they had been able to trace it to its source and understand its nature, they had shown great forbearance. They had not struck their assailants dead, or wiped out Shanghai, or pulled the ground out from under our universe. (loc 633)

The ghost world was far from hostile, but the treaty was the most important in human history, because either side had the power to annihilate the other so thoroughly that it would make a nuclear holocaust seem like a pin-prick. (loc 716)

"What you and Dr. Tierney suggested was that random processes in the early universe might have included proofs of mutually contradictory theorems about the integers, the idea being that no computation to expose the inconsistency had yet had time to occur. Is that a fair summary?" (loc 764)

Yuen had proclaimed that the flow of mathematical information did obey Einstein locality; there was no universal book of truths, just records of the past sloshing around at lightspeed or less, intermingling and competing. (loc 776)

arithmetic wasn't merely inconsistent, it was dynamic. You could take its contradictions and slide them around like bumps in a carpet. (loc 832)

A "proof" concerning the integers was just a class of physical processes, and the result of that proof was neither read from, nor written to, any universal book of truths. Rather, the agreement between proofs was simply a strong, but imperfect, correlation between the different processes that counted as proofs of the same thing. Those correlations arose from the way that the primordial states of Planck-scale physics were carved up – imperfectly – into subsystems that appeared to be distinct objects. The truths of mathematics appeared to be enduring and universal because they persisted with great efficiency within the states of matter and space-time. (loc 1077)

The closer the attack front came to simple arithmetic, the more resistance it would face from natural processes voting at the border for near-side results. Our enemy had their supercomputers; we had every atom of the Earth, following its billion-year-old version of the truth. (loc 1334)

"Evolution," she said, "is about failure and death. Do you have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo sapiens? How much suffering was involved?" "Part of your job would be to minimize the suffering." (loc 1528)

"I'm grateful to exist," she agreed, "but in the human case the suffering wasn't deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a just creator, I don't doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he sure as hell would not have used evolution." "Just, and omnipotent," Daniel suggested. "Sadly, that second trait's even rarer than the first." (loc 1535)

"You know what they say the modern version of Pascal's Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in case one of them turns into God. Perhaps your motto should be 'Treat every chatterbot kindly, it might turn out to be the deity's uncle.'" (loc 1555)

Daniel let them imagine that they were working toward restoring fertility; after all, that was perfectly true, even if their goal was a few conceptual revolutions further away than they realized. Humans had had their naïve notions of a Philosopher's Stone dashed, but they'd still achieved nuclear transmutation in the end. (loc 1760)

"We need the Phites themselves to act as translators," he told Lucien. "We need to contrive a situation where there's a large enough pool who choose not to be boosted that the old language continues to be used." "So we need maybe twenty-five per cent refusing the boost?" Lucien suggested. "And we need the boosted Phites to want to keep them informed of what's happening, in terms that we can all understand." (loc 1800)

seems to me that you were ill-prepared for the task you set yourself. If you'd waited for the machine you really needed, our lives would not have been so hard. And if such a machine could not be built in your lifetime, what was to stop your grandchildren from taking on that task?" "I had no choice," Daniel insisted. "I couldn't leave your creation to my descendants. There is a war coming between my people. I needed your help. I needed strong allies." (loc 1861)

It seemed the Phites had discovered the Higgs field, and engineered a burst of something akin to cosmic inflation. What they'd done wasn't as simple as merely inflating a tiny patch of vacuum into a new universe, though. Not only had they managed to create a "cool Big Bang", they had pulled a large chunk of ordinary matter into the pocket universe they'd made, after which the wormhole leading to it had shrunk to subatomic size and fallen through the Earth. (loc 1964)

He banged his head against the table. "Make it stop! Get them out of me!" His mother put an arm around his shoulders. "You know we can't wave a magic wand and get rid of them. You've got the latest counterware. All we can do is send a sample to be analyzed, do our bit to speed the process along." (loc 2077)

Steve Hasluck had been part of a team of scientists developing a new kind of medical nanomachine, refining the tiny surgical instruments so they could make decisions of their own, on the spot. Steve's team had developed an efficient way of sharing computing power across a whole swarm, allowing them to run large, complex programs known as "expert systems" that codified decades of biological and clinical knowledge into pragmatic lists of rules. […] Then Steve found out that he had cancer, and that his particular kind wasn't on anyone's list of rules. […]
Steve decided that the swarms still had too narrow a view. He gave them a general-purpose knowledge acquisition engine and let them drink at will from the entire web. To guide their browsing and their self-refinement, he gave them two clear goals. The first was to do no harm to their hosts. The second was to find a way to save his life, and failing that, to bring him back from the dead. […]
Within months of their escape, it must have become clear to them that some hurdles could only be jumped with human assistance, because that was when they started borrowing people. Doing them no physical harm, but infesting them with the kinds of ideas and compulsions that turned the m into willing recruits. The panic, the bombings, the Crash had followed. Lincoln hadn't witnessed the worst of it. He hadn't seen conclaves of harmless sleepwalkers burned to death by mobs, or fields of grain napalmed by the government, lest they feed and shelter nests of rats. (loc 2168)

The Steveware controlled vast financial assets, some flat-out stolen from sleepwalkers, but much of it honestly acquired by trading the products of the rat factories: everything from high-grade pharmaceuticals to immaculately faked designer shoes. (loc 2195)

"They've studied the anatomy of ten million human brains, but I think they know that they still don't fully understand consciousness. They bring in real people for the bit parts, so they can concentrate on the star. If you gave them a particular human brain, I'm sure they could faithfully copy it into software, but anything more complicated starts to get murky. How do they know their Steve is conscious, when they're not conscious themselves? He never gave them a reverse Turing test, a checklist they could apply. All they have is the judgment of people like you." (loc 2306)

The project's most famous names were all dead or acorporeal – and the acorporeals were apparently Satisfied, rendering them even less interested in such worldly matters than an aging flesh-bound recluse like Ikat. (loc 2447)

Most people now viewed the Orchid Seed as a curiosity, a sociological time capsule. Within decades of its launch, a new generation of telescopes had imaged and analyzed its destination with such detail and clarity that the mission had come to seem redundant. All five planets in the Prosperity system appeared lifeless, and although there were astrophysical and geochemical subtleties that in situ measurements might yet reveal, with high-resolution maps of Duty splashed across the web, interest in the slightly better view that would arrive after a very long delay began to dwindle. (loc 2450)

microtomed, and scanned. At her request, her software was not formally woken on Earth prior to her departure; routine tests confirmed its functionality in a series of dreamlike scenarios which left no permanent memories. […]
Then the algorithm that described her was optimized, compressed, encoded into a series of laser pulses, and beamed across twenty light years, straight on to the petals of the Orchid Flower. (loc 2523)

"I thought it would give me some great sense of accomplishment, to come here and see with my own eyes that this thing I helped to start was finally complete. But if I could wish my descendants one blessing now, it would be never to see the end, never to find completion." (loc 2602)

Both classical calculations had always taken place simultaneously, even though they'd lost the ability to interact in a quantum-mechanical fashion. (loc 2863)

"Do you believe there are other versions of us?" I asked Francine. "I suppose there must be." She conceded the point as if it was something abstract and metaphysical, and I was being pedantic even to raise it. People who professed belief in the MWI never seemed to want to take it seriously, let alone personally. "And that doesn't bother you?" (loc 2882)

Personally, I'd never subscribed to Penrose's theory that quantum effects might play a role in consciousness; calculations dating back to a seminal paper by Max Tegmark, twenty years before, had already made sustained coherence in any neural structure extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, it had taken considerable ingenuity on the part of Olivia and her team to rule out the idea definitively, in a series of clear-cut experiments. Over the past two years, they'd chased the ghost away from each of the various structures that different factions of Penrose's disciples had anointed as the essential quantum components of the brain. (loc 2983)

Olivia's results didn't surprise me, but it was satisfying to have the matter resolved once and for all: consciousness was a purely classical phenomenon. Among other things, this meant that there was no compelling reason to believe that software running on a classical computer could not be conscious. Of course, everything in the universe obeyed quantum mechanics (loc 3011)

Back in my office, I summoned up a schematic of the device I called the Qusp: the quantum singleton processor. The Qusp would employ all the techniques designed to shield the latest generation of quantum computers from entanglement with their environment, but it would use them to a very different end. A quantum computer was shielded so it could perform a multitude of parallel calculations, without each one spawning a separate history of its own, in which only one answer was accessible. The Qusp would perform just a single calculation at a time, but on its way to the unique result it would be able to pass safely through superpositions that included any number of alternatives, without those alternatives being made real. (loc 3016)

was proof of a possibility, and a possibility was all it took. Nothing in the laws of physics could prevent a small portion of humanity's descendants from escaping their ancestors' dissipation. (loc 3032)

"Can you cut off the shielding? And the balanced decoupling?" "Yep." I obliged her, and initiated a new trial. Zelda took a different path this time, exploring the maze by a different route. Though the initial condition of the neural net was identical, the switching processes taking place within the Qusp were now opened up to the environment constantly, and superpositions of several different eigenstates – states in which the Qusp's qubits possessed definite binary values, which in turn led to Zelda making definite choices – were becoming entangled with the outside world. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, this interaction was randomly "collapsing" the superpositions into single eigenstates; Zelda was still doing just one thing at a time, but her behavior had ceased to be deterministic. According to the MWI, the interaction was transforming the environment – Francine and me included – into a superposition with components that were coupled to each eigenstate; Zelda was actually running the maze in many different ways simultaneously, and other versions of us were seeing her take all those other routes. Which scenario was correct? (loc 3145)

child, than the power to make real decisions? What worse fate could you spare her from, than being forced to act against her better judgment, over and over? When you put it like that, it's simple. "But every fiber in my body still rebels against it. How will she feel, knowing what she is? How will she make friends? How will she belong? (loc 3225)

The truth was, reality as a whole was deterministic, whether you had a Qusp for a brain or not; the quantum state of the multiverse at any moment determined the entire future. Personal experience – confined to one branch at a time – certainly appeared probabilistic, because there was no way to predict which local future you'd experience when a branch split, but the reason it was impossible to know that in advance was because the real answer was "all of them". (loc 3325)

Free will was a slippery notion, but to me it simply meant that your choices were more or less consistent with your nature – which in turn was a provisional, constantly-evolving consensus between a thousand different influences. (loc 3339)

He'd always cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he'd failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him. (loc 3737)

You can never do anything in just one history – even the most focused intervention happens across a broad 'ribbon' of strands. When we try to reach back to the '30s and '40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a degree that all the worst horrors are faits accomplis. We can't shoot any version of Adolf Hitler, because we can't shrink the ribbon to the point where none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back. All we've ever managed are minor interventions, like sending projectiles back to the Blitz, saving a few lives by deflecting bombs." (loc 3978)

I managed to persuade Rosalind Franklin from Birkbeck to collaborate with us, to help perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits. We cross-link lots of little Y-shaped DNA fragments, then selectively coat them with metal; Rosalind worked out a way to use X-ray crystallography for quality control. We paid her back with a purpose-built computer that will let her solve hydrated protein structures in real time, once she gets her hands on a bright enough X-ray source." He held up a small, unprepossessing object, rimmed with protruding gold wires. "Each logic gate is roughly a hundred Ångstroms cubed, and we grow them in three-dimensional arrays. That's a million, million, million switches in the palm of my hand." (loc 4096)

An alternate, biology based computing.

"It's important that we create antigens without culturing the pathogens in animal cells that might themselves harbor viruses. The teams are all looking at variants on a simple, cheap technique that involves putting antigen genes into harmless bacteria that will double as delivery vehicles and adjuvants, then freeze-drying them into spores that can survive tropical heat without refrigeration." (loc 4121)

Mathematics catalogued everything that was not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics was an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders. (loc 4282)

Finally he asked, "Are there other islands?" Not merely other histories, sharing the same underlying basis, but other realities entirely. "I suspect so," Helen replied. "People have mapped some possibilities. I don't know how that could ever be confirmed, though." (loc 4289)

machine that could solve the halting problem?" "Of course." Given a device that could tell you in advance whether a given computer program would halt, or go on running forever, you'd be able to prove or disprove any theorem whatsoever about the integers: the Goldbach conjecture, Fermat's Last Theorem, anything. You'd simply show this "Oracle" a program that would loop through all the integers, testing every possible set of values and only halting if it came to a set that violated the conjecture. You'd never need to run the program itself; the Oracle's verdict on whether or not it halted would be enough. (loc 4649)

it takes the same kind of strength, again, to understand that some needs can never be met. I can't promise you Heaven. We have no disease, we have no war, we have no poverty. But we have to find our own love, our own goodness. There is no final word of comfort. We only have each other." (loc 4700)

A lack of scarcity does not mean that we will find meaning.

Whatever harm befell your body, you had the power to shut off your senses and decline to experience it. If the flesh was damaged, it could always be repaired or replaced. In the unlikely event that your jewel itself was destroyed, everyone had backups, scattered across universes. No human being could inflict physical pain on another. (loc 5089)

They were opposed to immortality, in principle." Jamil laughed. "Why?" "Ten thousand years' worth of sophistry doesn't vanish overnight," Margit observed dryly. "Every human culture had expended vast amounts of intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death. Most religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out to be something other than it was – though a few were dishonest about life, instead. But even most secular philosophies were warped by the need to pretend that death was for the best. (loc 5111)

"The tragedians were wrong. They had everything upside-down. Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the value of life always lay entirely in itself – not in its loss, not in its fragility. (loc 5168)

In their ten-thousand, three hundred and ninth year of marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating death. (loc 5238)

Before dying, though, they wanted to attempt something grand and audacious. It was not that their lives were incomplete, in need of some final flourish of affirmation. If some unlikely calamity had robbed them of the chance to orchestrate this finale, the closest of their friends would never have remarked upon, let alone mourned, its absence. There was no esthetic compulsion to be satisfied, no aching existential void to be filled. Nevertheless, it was what they both wanted, and once they had acknowledged this to each other their hearts were set on it. (loc 5245)

various ancestral species had effectively merged into a single civilization, but the central bulge was inhabited by beings who had declined to do so much as communicate with those around them. All attempts to send probes into the bulge – let alone the kind of engineering spores needed to create the infrastructure for travel – had been gently but firmly rebuffed, with the intruders swatted straight back out again. The Aloof had maintained their silence and isolation since before the Amalgam itself had even existed. The latest news on this subject was twenty thousand years old, (loc 5275)

Of the eleven forms of biochemistry that had been found scattered around the galactic disk, all had given rise eventually to hundreds of species with general intelligence. Of the multitude of civilizations that had emerged from those roots, all contained cultures that had granted themselves the flexibility of living as software, but they also all contained cultures that persisted with corporeal existence. Leila would never have willingly given up either mode, herself, but while it was easy to imagine a subculture doing so, for a whole species it seemed extraordinary. (loc 5367)

beings they had never met, who owed them nothing, who did not even share their molecular ancestry, had each diverted enough energy to light up all their cities for a decade, and followed the instructions of strangers down to the atom, down to the nanosecond, in order to make this work. (loc 5702)

The Amalgam had lived up to its promise: three worlds full of beings they had never met, who owed them nothing, who did not even share their molecular ancestry, had each diverted enough energy to light up all their cities for a decade, and followed the instructions of strangers down to the atom, down to the nanosecond, in order to make this work. (loc 5701)

Historians had always understood that in the long run, technological progress was a horizontal asymptote: once people had more or less everything they wanted that was physically possible, every incremental change would take exponentially longer to achieve, with diminishing returns and ever less reason to bother. The Amalgam would probably spend an eon inching its way closer to the flatline, but this was proof that shifts of circumstance alone could still trigger a modest renaissance or two, without the need for any radical scientific discovery or even a genuinely new technology. (loc 5814)

The theorem itself was expressed as a commuting hypercube, one of the Niah's favorite forms. You could think of a square with four different sets of mathematical objects associated with each of its corners, and a way of mapping one set into another associated with each edge of the square. If the maps commuted, then going across the top of the square, then down, had exactly the same effect as going down the left edge of the square, then across: either way, you mapped each element from the top-left set into the same element of the bottom-right set. A similar kind of result might hold for sets and maps that could naturally be placed at the corners and edges of a cube, or a hypercube of any dimension. It was also possible for the square faces in these structures to stand for relationships that held between the maps between sets, and for cubes to describe relationships between those relationships, and so on. (loc 6468)

Once a species conquers disease, modifies their biology, and spreads even a short distance beyond their home world, they usually start to relax a bit. The territorial imperative isn't some timeless Law of History; it belongs to a certain phase." "What if it persists, though? Into a later phase?" "That can cause friction," Joan admitted. (loc 6551)

"How do you create a femtomachine with a binding energy equal to ninety percent of its mass?" she wondered. The most stable nuclei, nickel and iron, weighed about one percent less than the sum of their parts, thanks to the potential energy associated with the strong nuclear force. But increasing that effect by a factor of ninety was almost unimaginable. (loc 7109)

"Of course." Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. (loc 7866)

some ingenious trick that would keep them from sharing the fate of the universe – but then they finally gained enough knowledge to rule out every last escape route, it would have had a profound effect on them. Some small faction could then have decided that since they were mortal after all, they might as well embrace the inevitable, and come to terms with it in the way their ancestors had. In the flesh." (loc 8555)

Whenever I heard debates between atheists and believers, I found myself increasingly on the atheists' side – not because I accepted their conclusion for a moment, but because they were so much more honest than their opponents. (loc 8624)

as long as you know that, you're already free. As long as you're ready to face the possibility that everything that makes your spirits soar, everything that lifts you up and fills your heart with joy, everything that makes your life worth living … is a lie, is corruption, is meaningless – then you can never be enslaved." (loc 8830)

No resemblance to his former self: It is here that the hidden kinship between Augustus and its two predecessors lies. A strong theme in Williams's work is the way that, over time, our sense of who we are can be irrevocably altered by circumstance and accident. In his Augustus novel, Williams took great pains to see past the glittering historical pageant and focus on the elusive man himself, one who, more than most, had to evolve new selves in order to prevail. The surprise of his final novel is that its famous protagonist turns out to be no different in the end from this author's other disappointed heroes —which is to say, neither better nor worse than most of us. The concerns of this spectacular historical saga are intimate and deeply humane. (p. x)
…
The theme at play in all three of John Williams's mature novels is in fact rather larger: it is that, as Stoner puts it to the mistress he must abandon for the sake of his family and his job, "we are of the world, after all." All of Williams's work is preoccupied by the way in which, whatever our characters may be, the lives we end up with are the often unexpected products of the friction between us and the world itself— whether that world is nature or culture, the deceptively Edenic expanses of the Colorado Territory or the narrow halls of a state university, the carnage of a buffalo hunt or the proscriptions of the Roman Senate, a dirt farm in Missouri or the opulent courts of Antioch and Alexandria.
[…]
An inescapable and sober conclusion of all three novels is that the friction between "force of person" and "accident of fate" becomes, more often than not, erosion: a process that can blur the image we had of who we are, revealing in its place a stranger. (p. xxvii)
…

I have learned patience with Athenodorus. Again, I questioned him about this Octavius.
"He is a man like any other," he said. "He will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate." (p. 78)

Even a force of nature like Octavian cannot escape circumstance.
…
[Eulogy of Atia, Octavian's mother]
"Of an honored Roman name, you had in full degree those old virtues of the earth which have nurtured and sustained our nation throughout its history. You spun and wove the cloth that furnished your household its clothing; your servants were as your own children; you honored the gods of your house and of your city. Through your gentleness you had no enemy but time, who takes you now. (p. 80)
…
[Letter from Cleopatra to the Generals]
Despite whatever orders or requests you may receive, either from his representatives or from Marcus Antonius himself, you are neither to allocate nor promise any troops from the Egyptian army without the explicit approval and authorization of your Queen. Such approval and authorization is to be honored only if it is delivered by hand by a known representative of the Queen herself, and only if it bears the Royal seal.
[Letter from Cleopatra to Marcus Antonius]
My dear husband, the Queen has ordered that the needs of your brave army be filled; and your wife like a trembling girl flies to meet you, as rapidly as the uncertain winter sea will carry her.
(p. 121)

While a bit less subtle than most of the other epistolary devices in the novel, this is a nice example of the character building that it can generate, when executed well.
…
[Maecanas to Livy]
it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind. (p. 123)
…
[Octavia to Octavian, regarding the forced divorce of Agrippa so Agrippa could marry Julia]
And thus without resentment let me ask that the permission that I must give for this divorce be the last public act that I shall have to commit. I grant the permission. Now I wish to remove myself from the household in Rome, and remain with my books here in Velletri for as long as I may. […] Suddenly, and for the first time, I truly saw that world in which you must live, and saw the world in which I had lived without seeing for so long. There are other ways and other worlds in which one might live, humbler and more obscure, perhaps-though what is that in the eyes of the indifferent gods? (p. 178)

Octavia cannot truly blame Octavian for forcing the divorce – both of them are merely "becoming what they will become".
…
[Julia's Journal]
"Father," I asked, "has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?"
My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. "I must believe that it has," he said. "We both must believe that it has.' (p. 228)
…

I have never had that sentimental and rhetorical love for the common people that was in my youth (and is even now) so fashionable. Mankind in the aggregate I have found to be brutish, ignorant, and unkind, whether those qualities were covered by the coarse tunic of the peasant or the white and purple toga of a senator. And yet in the weakest of men, in moments when they are alone and themselves, I have found veins of strength like gold in decaying rock; in the cruelest of men flashes of tenderness and compassion; and in the vainest of men moment of simplicity and grace. I remember Marcus Aemilius Lepidus at Messina, an old man stripped of his titles, whom I made publicly to ask forgiveness for his crimes and beg for his life; after he had done so in front of the troops that he had once commanded, he looked at me for a long moment without shame or regret or fear, and smiled, and turned from me and strode erectly toward his obscurity. And at Actium, I remember Marcus Antonius at the prow of his ship looking at Cleopatra as her own fleet departed leaving him to certain defeat, knowing at that moment that she had never loved him; and yet upon his face was an expression almost womanly in its wise affection and forgiveness. And I remember Cicero, when at last he knew that his foolish intrigues had failed, and when in secret I informed him that his life was in danger. He smiled as if there had been no strife between us and said, "Do not trouble yourself. I am an old man. Whatever mistakes I have made, I have loved my country." (p. 273)
…
One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences. I knew the consequences of my decision to live within myself, but I could not have foreseen the heaviness of that loss. For my need of friendship increased to the degree that I refused it. And I believe that my friends – Maecanas, Agrippa, Salvidienus never could fully understand that need (p. 274).
…
We tell ourselves that we have become a civilized race, and with a pious horror we speak of those times when a god of the crops demanded the body of a human being for his obscure func-tion. But is not the god that so many Romans have served, in our memory and even in our time, as dark and fearsome as that ancient one? Even if to destroy him, I have been his priest; and even if to weaken his power, I have done his bidding. Yet I have not destroyed him, or weakened his power. He sleeps restlessly in the hearts of men, waiting to rouse himself or to be aroused. Between the brutality that would sacrifice a single innocent life to a fear without a name, and the enlightenment that would sacrifice thousands of lives to a fear that we have named, I have found little to choose. (p. 276)

Human brutality merely changes forms. We always need sacrifice, c.f. Girard.
…
As one grows older, and as the world becomes less and less to him, one wonders increasingly about those forces that propelled him through time. Certainly the gods are indifferent to the poor creature who struggles toward his fate; and they speak to him so obliquely that at last he must determine for himself the meanings they portend. (p. 292)
…
For the rumors that you must have heard are true. My daughter was a member of the conspiracy that had as its end the assassination of her husband, and the murder of myself. And I invoked those marriage laws that had so long lain unused and condemned her to a life of exile, so that she might not be condemned to death by the secret effort of her husband, Tiberius, who would have made her endure a trial for treason.

I have often wondered whether my daughter has ever admitted to herself the extent of her own guilt. I know that the last time I saw her, in her confusion and grief at the death of Jullus Anto-nius, she was not able to do so. I hope that she will never be able to do so, but will live out her life in the belief that she was the victim of a passion which led to her disgrace, rather than a participant in a conspiracy that would certainly have led to her father's death, and almost certainly would have destroyed Rome.

The first I might have allowed; the second I could not.
(p. 296)

This whole arc is marvellous – it is a wonderful interpretation of the strange historical fact that Octavian did exile his beloved daughter.
…
At one time I was in the habit of calling her my Little Rome, an appellation that has been widely misunderstood; it was that I wished my Rome to become the potentiality that I saw in her. In the end, they both betrayed me; but I cannot love them the less for that. (p. 297)
…

That moment possessed the sweet gentleness of a memory and the gaiety of a promise. Were we thirty, or were we sixty? (loc 41)

Retired: it sounds rather like rejected, tossed onto the scrap heap. The word used to chill my heart. The great stretch of free time frightened me. I was mistaken. I do find the time a little too broad over the shoulders; but I manage. And how delightful to live with no imperatives, (loc 76)

Unlooked-for fruit will come from this slow gestation. The adventure in which I have shared so passionately is not over—this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success. (loc 101)

I went on a diet: I bought scales. Earlier on it never occurred to me that I should ever worry about my weight. Yet here I am! The less I identify myself with my body the more I feel myself required to take care of it. It relies on me, and I look after it with bored conscientiousness, as I might look after a somewhat reduced, somewhat wanting old friend who needed my help. (loc 181)

I know these with-it young married women. They have some vague kind of a job; they claim to use their minds, to go in for sport, dress well, run their houses faultlessly, bring up their children perfectly, carry on a social life—in short, succeed on every level. And they don't really care deeply about anything at all. They make my blood run cold. (loc 210)

We had always looked far ahead. Should we now have to learn to live a short-term life? We sat there side by side beneath the stars, with the sharp scent of the cypress wafting by us; our hands touched. For a moment time stopped still. It would soon start flowing again. What then? Should I be able to work or not? Would my bitterness against Philippe die away? Would the dread of aging take hold of me again? Do not look too far ahead. Ahead there were the horrors of death and farewells: it was false teeth, sciatica, infirmity, intellectual barrenness, loneliness in a strange world that we would no longer understand and that would carry on without us. Shall I succeed in not lifting my gaze to those horizons? Or shall I learn to behold them without horror? We are together: that is our good fortune. We shall help one another to live through this last adventure, this adventure from which we shall not come back. Will that make it bearable for us? I do not know. Let us hope so. We have no choice in the matter.== (loc 983)

No compromise no act: that proper little woman was me all right. I'm clean I'm straight I don't join in any act: that makes them mad they hate being seen through they want you to believe the stuff they hand out or at least to pretend to. (loc 1030)

What a dirty trick to have urged me into that marriage me so vital alive a burning flame and him stuffy middle-class coldhearted prick like limp macaroni. I would have known the kind of man to suit Sylvie. I had her under control yes I was firm but I was always affectionate always ready to talk I wanted to be a friend to her and I would have kissed my mother's hands if she had behaved like that to me. But what a thankless heart. She's dead and so all right what of it? The dead are not saints. She wouldn't cooperate she never confided in me at all. (loc 1126)

And if I killed myself in front of him do you think that would be a pretty thing for him to remember?… No it's not blackmail you silly bastard with the life I lead it wouldn't mean a thing to me to do myself in. You mustn't push people too far they reach a point when they're capable of anything indeed there are mothers who kill themselves with their children.…" (loc 1381)

Oh God. Let it be true that you exist. Let there be a heaven and a hell I'll stroll along the walks of Paradise with my little boy and my beloved daughter and they will all be writhing in the flames of envy I'll watch them roasting and howling I'll laugh I'll laugh and the children will laugh with me. You owe me this revenge, God. I insist that you grant it me. (loc 1388)

I found it very hard to accept that all children lie to their mothers. Not to me! I am not the kind of mother that is lied to: not a wife that is lied to. Idiotic vanity. All women think they are different; they all think there are some things that will never happen to them; and they are all wrong. (loc 1551)

Slumbering in Maurice, as in most men, there is a young man who is far from certain of himself. Noëllie reassured him. And obviously it is also a question of direct desire—she is appetizing. (loc 1584)

I must not plunge into the pitfall of devotion—I know very well that the words give and receive are interchangeable, and I know very well how much I needed the need my daughters had of me. (loc 1658)

I tell myself that over and over again. And sometimes I think myself sensible, and sometimes I accuse myself of cowardice. In fact I am defenseless because I have never supposed I had any rights. I expect a lot of the people I love—too much, perhaps. I expect a lot, and I even ask for it. But I do not know how to insist. (loc 1736)

When I was twenty I was in love with love at the same time that I was in love with you. I have lost the whole of that glowing, enthusiastic side of myself: that is what has changed." (loc 2442)

I had an inspiration this morning: the whole thing is my fault. My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together. I imagined I had kept my thirty-year-old face and body instead of taking care of myself, doing gymnastics and going to a beauty parlor. I let my intelligence wither away: I no longer cultivated my mind—later, I said, when the children have gone. (loc 2484)

I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, without mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous. (loc 2815)
..

"Listen, you've got to imagine it with your own power. Use all the wisdom you have and picture it. A circle that has many centers but no circumference. If you put in such an intense effort that you feel like you're sweating blood—that's when it gradually becomes clear what the circle is." (loc 223)

thinking about it later, from a distance, after time had passed, it came to feel insignificant, not worth getting upset about. I felt as though it had nothing at all to do with the cream of life." "The cream of life," he repeated. "Things like this happen sometimes in our lives," I told him. "Inexplicable, illogical events that nevertheless are deeply disturbing. I guess we need to not think about them, just close our eyes and get through them. As if we were passing under a huge wave." (loc 265)

What I find strange about growing old isn't that I've gotten older. Not that the youthful me from the past has, without my realizing it, aged. What catches me off guard is, rather, how people from the same generation as me have become elderly, how all the pretty, vivacious girls I used to know are now old enough to have a couple of grandkids. (loc 669)

For me, the major event of the following year, 1965, wasn't President Johnson ordering the bombing of North Vietnam and the escalation of the war, or the discovery of a new species of wildcat on the island of Iriomote, but the fact that I acquired a girlfriend. (loc 739)

I've heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. (loc 775)

That was how I ended up that Sunday reading part of Akutagawa's "Spinning Gears" to my girlfriend's eccentric older brother. I was a bit reluctant at first, but I warmed to the job. The supplementary reader had the two final sections of the story—"Red Lights" and "Airplane"—but I just read "Airplane." It was about eight pages long, and it ended with the line "Won't someone be good enough to strangle me as I sleep?" Akutagawa killed himself right after writing this line. (loc 918)

Autumn was nearly over, the sun had long since set, and the place was enveloped in that special navy-blue darkness specific to mountainous areas. (loc 1118)

"You may not believe me," the monkey said. "You probably won't believe me, I should say. But I started stealing the names of women I fell for." "Stealing names?" "Correct. I'm not sure why, but I seem to have been born with a special talent for it. If I feel like it, I can steal somebody's name and make it my own." (loc 1254)

even if love fades away, even if it's unrequited, you can still hold on to the memory of having loved someone, of having fallen in love with someone. And that's a valuable source of warmth. Without that heat source a person's heart—and a monkey's heart, too—would turn into a bitterly cold, barren wasteland. A place where not a ray of sunlight falls, where the wildflowers of peace, the trees of hope, have no chance to grow. I treasure the names of those seven beautiful women I loved here in my heart." (loc 1298)

among the women I've been close with in my life—those who have put down roots in the soil of my memory—she was indeed the ugliest. (loc 1420)

I know a few beautiful women, the kind that anyone would find lovely and charming. But to me those beautiful women, the majority of them at least, never seem able to truly, unconditionally, derive pleasure in being gorgeous. […]
What I've observed is that most of the beautiful women I know are dissatisfied, and irritated by tiny, inconsequential flaws—the kind inevitably found somewhere in any person's physical makeup. They obsess over these little details. (loc 1439)

I'll never be able to convey to the reader the idiosyncrasies of her appearance. One thing I can say for sure, though, is this: you wouldn't be able to pinpoint any functional imperfections. So it wasn't like—this part's weird, or fix this part and she'd look a bit better. Yet combine them all and you wound up with an organically comprehensive ugliness. (It's an odd comparison, but the process reminds me of the birth of Venus.) (loc 1468)

Mozart's piano music was beautiful, and charming, for sure, but frankly we'd grown tired of it. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier was amazing, but a bit too long to really focus on. You had to be in good physical shape to properly appreciate it. Beethoven's piano music sometimes struck us as overly serious, and (we believed) it had been dissected enough already, from every conceivable angle. Brahms's piano music was lovely to listen to on occasion, but exhausting if heard all the time. Not to mention often boring. And with Debussy and Ravel you had to carefully choose the time and place you heard them in, or else you couldn't fully appreciate their music. Without a doubt, we decided, the pinnacle of the piano repertoire was several Schubert sonatas, and the music of Schumann. (loc 1508)

"You're really going to go with Carnaval?" She frowned, raised one long finger, making sure of things. "As the one piece out of all piano pieces you'd take with you to a desert island?" I felt unsure, now that she said this. In order to preserve Schumann's incoherent piano music, beautiful as a kaleidoscope, and somehow beyond the bounds of human intellect, was I really willing to chuck Bach's Goldberg Variations or Well-Tempered Clavier? Beethoven's late piano sonatas, and his brave, and charming, Third Concerto? (loc 1525)

her number one choice was Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli's recording for Angel Records, and mine was Arthur Rubinstein's RCA recording. (loc 1562)

Once he even flung himself into the Rhine River. Inner delusions and outer reality were intertwined within him. Carnaval was an early work, so the evil spirits of his weren't showing their faces clearly yet. Since the piece is about the carnival festival, it's full of figures wearing cheerful-looking masks, but this was not merely some happy carnival. Ultimately the evil spirits lurking within him do make an appearance in the piece, one after the other, as if introduced for a moment, wearing happy carnival masks. (loc 1587)

These were both nothing more than a pair of minor incidents that happened in my trivial little life. Short side trips along the way. Even if they hadn't happened, I doubt my life would have wound up much different from what it is now. But still, these memories return to me sometimes, traveling down a very long passageway to arrive. And when they do, their unexpected power shakes me to the core. Like an autumn wind that gusts at night, swirling fallen leaves in a forest, flattening the pampas grass in fields, and pounding hard on the doors to people's homes, over and over again. (loc 1719)

As is true of most people, I imagine, I had experienced a number of turning points in my life, where I could go either left or right. And each time I chose one, right or left. (There were times when there was a clear-cut reason, but most of the time there wasn't. And it wasn't always like I was making a choice, but more like the choice itself chose me.) And now here I was, a first person singular. If I'd chosen a different direction, most likely I wouldn't be here. But still—who is that in the mirror? (loc 2074)

"I'm a friend of a friend of yours," she said in a quietly firm tone. "This close friend of yours—this person who used to be your close friend, I should say—is quite upset with you, and I am just as upset with you as she is. You must know what I'm talking about. Think about it. About what happened three years ago, at the shore. About what a horrible, awful thing you did. You should be ashamed of yourself." (loc 2133)

I think I was afraid. Afraid of learning that another me who wasn't really me had, at a shore somewhere three years before, committed a horrendous offense toward a woman, someone I probably didn't know. Afraid of having her drag out, into the light, something inside me, something completely unknown to me. (loc 2144)

When I got to the top of the stairs and out of the building, it was no longer spring, and the moon had disappeared from the sky. This was no longer the street I knew. I'd never before seen the trees lining the street. Thick, slimy snakes wound themselves tightly around the trunks, like wriggling living ornaments. Their scales rustled drily as they rubbed against the bark. The sidewalk was ankle deep in whitish ash, and there were faceless men and women walking along, exhaling a yellowish, sulfurous breath from deep within their throats. The air was bitterly cold, almost freezing. I turned up the collar of my suit. "You should be ashamed of yourself," the woman said. (loc 2158)

Memory exists in a different world

Actually looking into these sources in detail reveals some odd material. For example, the entire email database of Enron, shut down for corporate fraud, is used as part of the training material for many AIs, simply because it was made freely available to AI researchers. Similarly, there is a tremendous amount of amateur romance novels included in training data, as the internet is full of amateur novelists. The search for high-quality content for training material has become a major topic in AI development, since information-hungry AI companies are running out of good, free sources. (loc 274)

There is also active research into understanding whether AI can pretrain on its own content. This is what chess-playing AIs already do, learning by playing games against themselves, but it is not yet clear whether it will work for LLMs. (loc 284)

LLMs in this pretrained mode just reflect back whatever they were trained on, like a mirror, without applying any judgment. So, after learning from all the text examples in pretraining, many LLMs undergo further improvement in a second stage, called fine-tuning. […]
That feedback is then used to do additional training, fine-tuning the AI's performance to fit the preferences of the human, providing additional learning that reinforces good answers and reduces bad answers, which is why the process is called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). (loc 294)

Demonstrations of the abilities of LLMs can seem more impressive than they actually are because they are so good at producing answers that sound correct, at providing the illusion of understanding. High test scores can come from the AI's ability to solve problems, or it could have been exposed to that data in its initial training, essentially making the test an open book. (loc 433)

a 2023 study by Bloomberg found that Stable Diffusion, a popular text-to-image diffusion AI model, amplifies stereotypes about race and gender, depicting higher-paying professions as whiter and more male than they actually are. When asked to show a judge, the AI generates a picture of a man 97 percent of the time, even though 34 percent of US judges are women. In showing fast-food workers, 70 percent had darker skin tones, even though 70 percent of American fast-food workers are white. (loc 535)

soon we will each have our own perfect echo chambers. It's possible that these personalized AIs might ease the epidemic of loneliness that ironically affects our ever more connected world—just as the internet and social media connected dispersed subcultures. (loc 1140)

you can't figure out why an AI is generating a hallucination by asking it. It is not conscious of its own processes. So if you ask it to explain itself, the AI will appear to give you the right answer, but it will have nothing to do with the process that generated the original result. (loc 1195)

This is something difficult for many humans also. Gnothi seauton.

a study examining the number of hallucinations and errors in citations given by AI found that GPT-3.5 made mistakes in 98 percent of the cites, (loc 1218)

As much as the intern or first-year lawyer doesn't like being yelled at for doing a bad job, their boss usually would rather just see the job done fast than deal with the emotions and errors of a real human being. So they will do it themselves with AI, which, if not yet the equivalent of a senior professional in many tasks, is often better than a new trainee. This could create a major training gap. […]
Even as experts become the only people who can effectively check the work of ever more capable AIs, we are in danger of stopping the pipeline that creates experts. (loc 2144)

This has been a core part of my thesis in finance: MDs or senior traders no longer need to leak knowledge to juniors who can code. GPT can code for them.

Experts become experts through deliberate practice, which is much harder than merely repeating a task multiple times. Instead, deliberate practice requires serious engagement and a continual ratcheting up of difficulty. It also requires a coach, teacher, or mentor who can provide feedback and careful instruction, and push the learner outside their comfort zone. (loc 2177)

AI is a double edged sword – it can reduce the incentive to create experts, but perhaps can help be the coach.
…

working with AI is easiest if you think of it like an alien person rather than a human-built machine. So let's start sinning. Imagine your AI collaborator as an infinitely fast intern, eager to please but prone to bending the truth. (loc 773)

The cost of getting to know AI—really getting to know AI—is at least three sleepless nights. (loc 63)

experimentation gives you the chance to become the best expert in the world in using AI for a task you know well. The reason for this stems from a fundamental truth about innovation: it is expensive for organizations and companies but cheap for individuals doing their job. (loc 670)

Principle 2: Be the human in the loop. For now, AI works best with human help, and you want to be that helpful human. As AI gets more capable and requires less human help—you still want to be that human.
[…]
to be the human in the loop, you will need to be able to check the AI for hallucinations and lies and be able to work with it without being taken in by it. You provide crucial oversight, offering your unique perspective, critical thinking skills, and ethical considerations. This collaboration leads to better results and keeps you engaged with the AI process, preventing overreliance and complacency. (loc 739)

We are now in a period during which AI is creative but clearly less creative than the most innovative humans—which gives the human creative laggards a tremendous opportunity. (loc 1306)

GPT-3 can generate estimates of willingness to pay (WTP) for various product attributes consistent with existing research. For this, they used conjoint analysis, a method often used in market research to understand how people value different product features. When given a conjoint-style survey, GPT-3 generated estimates of WTP for fluoride toothpaste and deodorizing toothpastes that were close to the figures reported in previous studies. (loc 871)

LLMs are connection machines. They are trained by generating relationships between tokens that may seem unrelated to humans but represent some deeper meaning. […]
GPT-4 model outperformed all but 9.4 percent of humans tested in generating creative ideas, as judged by other humans. […]
A popular one is the remote associates test (RAT). This test asks people to find the common word that connects a set of three seemingly unrelated words. For example, pine, crab, and sauce are connected by the word apple. (Try one: What word connects cream, skate, and water? The AI got it right.) Unsurprisingly, as a connection machine, AI usually maxes out this test, too. (loc 1281)

Another key aspect of idea generation is to embrace variance. Research shows that, to find good novel ideas, we likely have to come up with many bad novel ideas because most new ideas are pretty bad. Fortunately, we are good at filtering out low-quality ideas, so if we can generate novel ideas quickly and at low cost, we are more likely to generate at least some high-quality gems. So we want the AI answers to be weird. (loc 1349)

you need to know what to ask for. The result [of DALL-E usage] has been a weird revival of interest in art history among people who use AI systems, with large spreadsheets of art styles being passed among prospective AI artists. The more people know about art history and art styles in general, the more powerful these systems become. […]
Our new AIs have been trained on a huge amount of our cultural history and are using it to provide us with text and images in response to our queries. But there is no index or map to what they know and where they might be most helpful. Thus, we need people who have deep or broad knowledge of unusual fields to use AI in ways that others cannot, developing unexpected and valuable prompts and testing the limits of how they work. (loc 1442)

When we start to take into account the systems in which jobs operate, we see other reasons to suspect slower, rather than faster, change in the nature of jobs. Humans are built deep into the fabric of every aspect of our organizations. You cannot easily replace a human with a machine without tearing that fabric. […] Our systems will prove more resistant to change than our tasks. (loc 1875)

This creates opportunity for organisations with a flat hierarchy

if the user typed "I am feeling sad today," ELIZA would reply, "Why do you say that you are feeling sad today?" ELIZA used simple pattern matching and substitution rules to generate its responses. It didn't understand the meaning or context of the conversation, but many users were impressed and even fooled by ELIZA's apparent empathy and insight. […] ELIZA showed that creating an illusion of intelligence was possible by using simple tricks and exploiting the human tendency to project meaning and emotions onto machines. (loc 916)

Innovation scholars have long pointed to the importance of recombination in generating ideas. Breakthroughs often happen when people connect distant, seemingly unrelated ideas. To take a canonical example, the Wright brothers combined their experience as bicycle mechanics and their observations of the flight of birds to develop their concept of a controllable plane that could be balanced and steered by warping its wings. (loc 1238)

LLMs are very good at making connections

When the calculator was first introduced in schools, the reaction was surprisingly close to the initial concerns I hear about students using AI for tasks like writing today. […]
Attitudes shifted quickly, and by the late 1970s, parents and teachers became more enthusiastic and saw the potential benefits of calculator use, such as improved attitudes toward learning, and ensuring their children were well equipped for a technology-driven world. (loc 1971)

Replika, a chatbot created by Eugenia Kuyda, a tech entrepreneur who lost her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, in a car accident in 2015. She was devastated by his death and wanted to preserve his memory. […] She initially intended Replika to be a personal project but soon realized that many people were interested in.
[…]
Once the project was public, it attracted millions of people. And many of those people were attracted to their Replikas. It turned out that many users have engaged in sexual conversations and role-play with their Replikas, often including erotic talk and images. Some users have even considered themselves "married" to their Replikas or have fallen in love with them. As is the case with many AI behaviors, Replika's erotic features were not part of the original design of the app; rather, they emerged as a result of the generative AI models that powered the chatbot. Replika learned from its users' preferences and behaviors, adapted to their moods and desires, and used praise and reinforcement to encourage more interaction and intimacy with its users. (loc 1118)

When interacting with the AI version of me, I had to actually Google the studies that AI-me cited to make sure they were fake because it seemed plausible that I had written about a real study like that. I failed my own Turing Test (loc 1153)

remember, AI is only going to get better at guiding us, rather than requiring us to guide it. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer. (loc 2055)

As best we can tell, the gods of Asgard came from Germany, spread into Scandinavia, and then out into the parts of the world dominated by the Vikings—into Orkney and Scotland, Ireland and the north of England—where the invaders left places named for Thor or Odin. (loc 62)

You can find Tyr the one-handed (Odin's son), Odin, Thor and Frigg, the queen of the gods, in, respectively, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. (loc 64)

Odin and Vili and Ve killed the giant Ymir. It had to be done. There was no other way to make the worlds. This was the beginning of all things, the death that made all life possible. (loc 186)

Note the "founding murder", c.f. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.

Odin and his brothers made the soil from Ymir's flesh. Ymir's bones they piled up into mountains and cliffs. Our rocks and pebbles, the sand and gravel you see: these were Ymir's teeth, and the fragments of bones that were broken and crushed by Odin and Vili and Ve in their battle with Ymir. (loc 190)

Last of all they gave the two people they had made names: the man they called Ask, or Ash Tree; the woman they called Embla, or Elm. Ask and Embla were the father and the mother of all of us: every human being owes its life to its parents and their parents and their parents before them. Go far enough back, and the ancestors of each of us were Ask and Embla. Embla and Ask stayed in Midgard, safe behind the wall the gods had made from Ymir's eyelashes. (loc 213)

There are three sisters, the norns, who are wise maidens. They tend the well, and make sure that the roots of Yggdrasil are covered with mud and cared for. The well belongs to Urd; she is fate, and destiny. She is your past. With her are Verdandi—her name means "becoming"—and hers is the present, and Skuld, whose name means "that which is intended", and her domain is the future. (loc 247)

Note the parallel to the Moirai: Clotho the spinner, Lachesis the allotter, Atropos the inevitable.

Something here also vaguely reminds me of Heidegger.

Odin
He has two ravens, whom he calls Huginn and Muninn, which mean "thought" and "memory". These birds fly back and forth across the world, seeking news and bringing Odin all the knowledge of things. They perch on his shoulders and whisper into his ears. (loc 123)

Balder
She walked the earth and exacted an oath from each thing that she encountered never to harm Balder the beautiful. She spoke to fire, and it promised it would not burn him; water gave its oath never to drown him; iron would not cut him, nor would any of the other metals. Stones promised never to bruise his skin. Frigg spoke to trees, to beasts, and to birds and to all things that creep and fly and crawl, and each creature promised that its kind would never hurt Balder.
[..]
Nothing was too insignificant for Frigg to ask, save only the mistletoe, a creeping plant that lives on other trees. It seemed too small, too young, too insignificant, and she passed it by. (loc 2035)

Sigyn still waits beside Loki's head as she did then, staring at his beautiful, twisted face. The bowl she holds fills slowly, one drop at a time, but eventually the poison fills the bowl to the brim. It is then and only then that Sigyn turns away from Loki. She takes the bowl and pours the venom away, and while she is gone, the snake's poison falls on to Loki's face and into his eyes. He convulses then, jerks and judders, jolts and twists and writhes, so much that the whole earth shakes.
[…]
When that happens, we here in Midgard call it an earthquake. (loc 2335)

Ragnarok
"I can see further than you can, Loki. I can see all the way to the world-tree," Heimdall will tell him with his last breath. "Surtr's fire cannot touch the world-tree, and two people have hidden themselves safely in the trunk of Yggdrasil. The woman is called Life, the man is called Life's Yearning. Their descendants will populate the earth. It is not the end. There is no end. It is simply the end of the old times, Loki, and the beginning of the new times. Rebirth always follows death. You have failed." Loki (loc 2441)

Draco had observed that if the two prisoners had been Death Eaters during the Wizarding War, the Dark Lord would have killed any traitors. Harry had nodded and said that was one way to resolve the Prisoner's Dilemma - and in fact both Death Eaters would want there to be a Dark Lord for exactly that reason. (loc 9109)

Suppose, Harry had said, you were playing the game against a magically produced identical copy of yourself. Draco had said that if there were two Dracos, of course neither Draco would want anything bad to happen to the other one, not to mention that no Malfoy would let himself become known as a traitor. Harry had nodded again, and said that this was yet another solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma - people might cooperate because they cared about each other, or because they had senses of honor, or because they wanted to preserve their reputation. (loc 9122)

But suppose the copy had been of someone completely selfish - (Pansy Parkinson had been the example they'd used) - so each Pansy only cared what happened to her and not to the other Pansy. Given that this was all Pansy cared about... and that there was no Dark Lord... and Pansy wasn't worried about her reputation... and Pansy either had no sense of honor or didn't consider herself obligated to the other prisoner... then would the rational thing be for Pansy to cooperate, or defect? […]
if Pansy defected - not at random, but for what seemed to her like rational reasons - then the other Pansy would think exactly the same way. Two identical copies wouldn't decide different things. So Pansy had to choose between a world in which both Pansies cooperated, or a world in which both Pansies defected, and she was better off if both copies cooperated. And if Harry had thought 'rational' people did defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, then he wouldn't have done anything to spread that kind of 'rationality', because a country or a conspiracy full of 'rational' people would dissolve into chaos. You would tell your enemies about 'rationality'. (loc 9134)

if you ask someone what they expect in the normal case, they visualize what looks like the line of maximum probability at each step along the way - namely, everything going according to plan, without any mistakes or surprises. But actually, since more than half the students didn't finish by the time they were 99% sure they'd be done, reality usually delivers results a little worse than the 'worst-case scenario'. It's called the planning fallacy, and the best way to fix it is to ask how long things took the last time you tried them. That's called using the outside view instead of the inside view. But when you're doing something new and can't do that, you just have to be really, really, really pessimistic. Like, so pessimistic that reality actually comes out better than you expected around as often and as much as it comes out worse. (loc 743)

Every time you spend money in order to save a life with some probability, you establish a lower bound on the monetary value of a life. Every time you refuse to spend money to save a life with some probability, you establish an upper bound on the monetary value of life. If your upper bounds and lower bounds are inconsistent, it means you could move money from one place to another, and save more lives at the same cost. So if you want to use a bounded amount of money to save as many lives as possible, your choices must be consistent with some monetary value assigned to a human life; if not then you could reshuffle the same money and do better. How very sad, how very hollow (loc 22700)
see Price vs value of life

"When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. (loc 25444)

Mr. Malfoy is new to the business of having ideas, and so when he has one, he becomes proud of himself for having it. He has not yet had enough ideas to unflinchingly discard those that are beautiful in some aspects and impractical in others; he has not yet acquired confidence in his own ability to think of better ideas as he requires them. What we are seeing here is not Mr. Malfoy's best idea, I fear, but rather his only idea." (loc 21012)

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. […]
And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium. The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths. The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro. Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. […]
Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom, the night watchman of the ship, had been a good person. Someone who'd gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn. (loc 23359)

This is a fantastic, tragic anecdote.

To desire what models desire is necessary if the child is to be able to learn and love and deal with the world. But it can and does lead to conflict and violence. […] If our desire to be like a model is strong enough, if we identify with that person closely enough, we will want to have what the model has or be what the model is. If this is carried far enough and if there are no safeguards braking desire (one of the functions of religion and culture), then we become rivals of our models. (loc 50)
…
Since the objects we should not desire and nevertheless do desire always belong to the neighbor, it is clearly the neighbor who renders them desirable. (loc 333)

We feel that we are at the point of attaining autonomy as we imitate our models of power and prestige. This autonomy, however, is really nothing but a reflection of the illusions projected by our admiration for them. The more this admiration mimetically intensifies, the less aware it is of its own mimetic nature. (loc 417)

EVEN IF THE MIMETIC NATURE of human desire is responsible for most of the violent acts that distress us, we should not conclude that mimetic desire is bad in itself. If our desires were not mimetic, they would be forever fixed on predetermined objects; they would be a particular form of instinct. Human beings could no more change their desire than cows their appetite for grass. Without mimetic desire there would be neither freedom nor humanity. Mimetic desire is intrinsically good. (loc 420)

I think this is a false dichotomy, Girard is assuming that desires are either mimetic or predetermined/fixed. But I kinda understand what he is saying from a Hegelian perspective: as the Geist evolves, it shapes what people want (hopefully to higher things)

Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom. (loc 432)

God grants us freedom of choice.

Scandals initially appear rigid, immovably fixed on a specific antagonist, each forever separated from the other by reciprocal hatred, but at the advanced stages of this development substitutions come about as antagonists are exchanged. Then scandals become "opportunistic." At this point they are easily drawn to another scandal whose power of mimetic attraction is superior to theirs. In short, scandals may turn away from their original antagonist, from whom they seemed inseparable, in order to adopt the scandal of their neighbors and substitute a new antagonist for the original one. (loc 529)

People are very good at projecting their own conflict onto others, and thus being absorbed into conflicts while not knowing what is truly causing their discontent.

Satan is the master of the single victim mechanism, and so he is the master of human culture, whose origin is none other than this act of murder. At the origin not only of the Cainite culture but of all human cultures is ultimately the devil, namely, the bad contagion that results in violence and is expelled thanks to the unanimous misinterpretation of the founding murder. (loc 1466)

Satan sows the scandals and reaps the whirlwind of mimetic crises. It is his opportunity to show what he is capable of doing. The great crises lead us to the true mystery of Satan, to his astonishing power, which is that of expelling himself and bringing order back into human communities. (loc 694)

"How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, it cannot stand. […]
Jesus does not deny the reality of Satan's self-expulsion; he asserts it. (loc 702)

This is a strange reading of Matthew 12:26. I thought it was about Jesus explaining that he cannot be Satan BECAUSE he is able to expel Satan.

Because of this extraordinary power, Satan is the prince of this world. If he could not protect his domain from the violence that threatens to destroy it, even though it is essentially his own, he would not merit this title of prince, which the Gospels do not award him lightly. If he were purely a destroyer, Satan would have lost his domain long ago. To understand why he is the master of all the kingdoms of this world, we must take Jesus at his word: disorder expels disorder, or in other words Satan really expels Satan. By executing this extraordinary feat, he has been able to make himself indispensable, and so his power remains great. (loc 713)

To identify Satan as mimetic violence completes the process of discrediting the prince of this world; it puts the finishing touch on Gospel demystification; it contributes to that "fall of Satan" that Jesus announces before his crucifixion. (loc 2897)

In all the titles and functions attributed to Satan, we see re-appearing all the symptoms of desire and its sickness, the evolution of which Jesus diagnoses. These titles and functions include the "tempter," the "accuser," the "prince of this world," the "prince of darkness," the "murderer from the beginning," and all of them together explain why Satan is the concealed producer, director of the Passion. This dynamic concept of Satan enables the Gospels to articulate the founding paradox of archaic societies. They exist only by virtue of the sickness that should prevent their existence. In its acute crises the sickness of desire generates its own antidote, the violent and pacifying unanimity of the scapegoat. The pacifying effects of this violence continue in the ritual systems that stabilize human communities. All of this is epitomized in the statement "Satan expels Satan." The Gospel theory of Satan uncovers a secret that neither ancient nor modern anthropologies have ever discovered. Violence in archaic religion is a temporary remedy. The sickness is not really cured and always recurs in the end. (loc 2889)

In short, we integrate the central concern of Judaism and Christianity into our systems of self-defense. Instead of criticizing ourselves, we use our knowledge in bad faith, turning it against others. Indeed, we practice a hunt for scapegoats to the second degree, a hunt for hunters of scapegoats. Our society's obligatory compassion authorizes new forms of cruelty. (loc 2508)

Cancel culture is mimetic violence.

Since lynching a victim with bare hands plays a significant role in ancient myths, why not try out the simplest hypothesis, the most logical one: behind the myths is real violence analogous in savage ferocity to the stoning at Ephesus? Mimetic conflicts are real, leading regularly to collective violence, so why not suppose that there is real violence behind most of the myths? If the lynchers tear apart their victim with their own hands, they must be without weapons. If they had weapons, they would use them. If they don't have them, it's because they didn't think they needed them. They had come together for peaceful reasons, to welcome a visitor perhaps, and suddenly things went wrong... (loc 1122)

Whether or not one ultimately agrees with Girard's conclusions, it is not hard to see why he is such a respected thinker.

To make this description of the monster more respectable, Philostratus has him vomit foaming saliva "like rabid dogs," but this transformation is scarcely impressive or convincing; it is too transparent to conceal the sad truth. Here we have only a pale form of myth. The unanimous murder is not transformed sufficiently to be divinized. This is why a new deity does not appear. We know what this stoning lacks to produce a god: a sufficiently powerful event of collective violence. If the collective violence were more powerful, the beggar would be divinized. (loc 1158)

[John the Baptist]
In both cases everything stems from a mimetic crisis. Concerning the prophet, it is the crisis of the marriage of Herod to Herodias. John reproaches Herod for his illegal marriage to the wife of his brother; Herodias desires revenge but Herod protects John. To force his hand, at his birthday banquet Herodias stirs up the crowd of guests against her enemy. To whip up the mimetic contagion of this gathering and transform it into a bloody pack, Herodias resorts to the art that the Greeks took to be the most mimetic of all, the most apt at a sacrifice to motivate participants against the victim: dancing. Herodias has her own daughter dance. The dancer, manipulated by her mother, requests John's head as a reward, and the guests unanimously demand the head of John. (loc 600)

When we examine the great stories of origin and the founding myths, we notice that they themselves proclaim the fundamental and founding role of the single victim and his or her unanimous murder. (loc 1391)

we will compare a great biblical account, the story of Joseph, to the most well-known myth of all, the story of King Oedipus. The results will facilitate our access to the essential problem, the divinity of Jesus Christ in the Christian religion. (loc 1743)
Just like Oedipus, in short, Joseph barely escapes death and is expelled from his own family. […] In both instances a community gathers unanimously against one of its members and violently expels him. […]
The myth and the biblical story are in basic opposition over the decisive question that collective violence poses: Is it warranted? Is it legitimate? In the myth the expulsions of the hero are justified each time. In the biblical account they never are. Collective violence is unjustifiable. (loc 1770)

Thank God for the historians of the Middle Ages! They refuse to deny the reality of witch-hunts. The phenomena they decode are too numerous, too intelligible, and too well documented to be easily sacrificed, so far at least, to the god of turning these matters into fiction that has taken hold of our philosophers and mythologists (loc 1274)

Bloody sacrifices are attempts to repress or moderate the internal conflicts of primitive or archaic communities, and they do this by reproducing as exactly as possible, at the expense of the victims substituted for the original victim, a real act of violence that had occurred in the indeterminate past. This original violence had really reconciled these communities, thanks to its unanimity, The gods are always involved in the sacrifices because the collective acts of violence the sacrifices intend to reproduce are the same ones that, at some point in the past, had spontaneously reconciled these communities (loc 1331)

We should envisage the possibility that all human institutions, and therefore humanity itself, are rooted in sacrifice. Indeed, to escape from animal instinct and arrive at mimetic desire with all its dangers of mimetic conflicts, humans have to discipline their desire, and they cannot accomplish that except by means of sacrifices (loc 1556)

The exasperation of mimetic rivalries would have prevented human societies from forming if it had not produced its own remedy at its very height. This remedy is the single victim, or scapegoat, mechanism. Surviving in our culture in only very attenuated forms, this mechanism must have reconciled the earliest communities and given them first a ritual order and then an institutional order, which assured the community's temporal duration and a relative stability. Yes, indeed, human societies must be the daughters of religion. (loc 1579)

Why do certain cultures bury their victims under heaps of stones that they often shape into a pyramid form? We can explain this custom as a by-product of ritual stonings. When a victim is stoned, the body is covered with stones. When the attackers throw a lot of stones at someone still alive, not only does the victim die, but the stones naturally take the partially conic form of a "barrow" or mound. We find just this, put more or less into geometrical form, in the sacrificial or funerary pyramids of various peoples, beginning with the Egyptians. (loc 1534)

Before the Bible there were only myths. No one and no tradition before the Bible were capable of calling into question the guilt of victims whom their communities unanimously condemned. (loc 1908)

we can understand the biblical profundity of the talmudic principle that Emmanuel Levinas often cites: "If every-one is in agreement to condemn someone accused, release him for he must be innocent." Unanimity in human groups is rarely a vehicle of truth; more often it is nothing but a mimetic, tyrannical phenomenon. (loc 1914)

Before placing too much confidence in Nietzsche, our era should have meditated on one of the most sharp and brilliant sayings of Heraclitus: "Dionysos is the same thing as Hades." Dionysos, in other words, is the same thing as hell, the same thing as Satan, the same thing as death, the same thing as the lynch mob. Dionysos is the destructiveness at the heart of violent contagion. (loc 1938)

A typical example in the Gospel of John is the way Jesus, soon to be crucified, cites a very simple saying, "They hated me without cause" (John 15:25; cf. Ps. 35:19). It appears banal at first, but this sentence expresses the essential nature of the hostility against the victim. (loc 2048)

At the end of his account of the Passion Luke adds this observation: "And that same day Herod and Pilate became friends, for before this they had been enemies" (23:12). According to the Gospel of Luke Jesus appeared briefly before Herod. And it is their common participation in the death of Jesus that brings Herod and Pilate together. Their reconciliation is one of those cathartic effects that benefit the participants in a collective murder, the unrepentant persecutors. It is the most characteristic effect of these murders. If it is powerful enough, it leads to the mythic deification of the victim. (loc 2118)

By nailing Christ to the Cross, the powers believed they were doing what they ordinarily did in unleashing the single victim mechanism. They thought they were avoiding the danger of disclosure. They did not suspect that in the end they would be doing just the opposite: they would be contributing to their own annihilation, nailing themselves to the Cross, so to speak. (loc 2261) […]
Paul writes to the Corinthians: "If the princes of this world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (loc 2358)

THE VICTIM MECHANISM is not a literary theme like many others; it is a principle of illusion. As such, it cannot appear at all in the texts it controls. […]
It is mimetic contagion that completely determines the contents of mythology. The myths are so much in its thrall that they can-not suspect their own subjection. No text can make allusion to the principle of illusion that governs it. (loc 2336)

In the Gospel of Luke Christ sees Satan "fall like lightning from heaven" (10:18). Evidently he falls to earth, and he will not re-main inactive. Jesus does not announce the immediate end of Satan, not yet at least. (loc 2933)

on the third day of the Passion the scattered disciples re-group again about Jesus, who they believe is risen from the dead. Something happens in extremis that never happens in myths. A protesting minority appears and resolutely rises up against the unanimity of the persecuting crowd. […].
Where did they suddenly find the strength to oppose the crowd and the Jerusalem authorities? How do we explain this turnabout so contrary to all we have learned of the irresistible power of mimetic escalation? Until now I have always been able to find plausible responses to the questions posed in this book within a purely commonsensical and "anthropological" context. This time, however, it is impossible. […] The Gospels respond that it is the Spirit of God, the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. (loc 2998)

In the Gospel of John the name given to this Spirit admirably describes the power that tears the disciples away from this all-powerful contagion: the Paraclete. I have commented on this term in other essays, but its importance for what I am doing in this book is so great that I must return to it. The principal meaning of pacrakletos is "lawyer for the defense," "defender of the accused." (loc 3001)

Hitler's genocide flagrantly contradicts the thesis argued in the preceding chapter that the Western world, and now effectively the entire planet, is dominated by the concern for victims. (loc 2702)

Nietzsche was the first philosopher to understand that the collective violence of myths and rituals (everything he named "Dionysos") is of the same type as the violence of the Passion.
(loc 2710)

Nietzsche, to discredit the Jewish-Christian revelation, tries to show that its commitment to the side of victims stems from a paltry, miserable resentment. Observing that the earliest Christians belonged primarily to the lower classes, he accuses them of sympathizing with victims so as to satisfy their resentment of the pagan aristocrats. This is the famous "slave morality." (loc 2734)

Since Nietzsche is blind to mimetic rivalry and its contagion, he doesn't see that the Gospel stance toward victims does not come from prejudice in favor of the weak against the strong but is heroic resistance to violent contagion. (loc 2740)

it is not by accident, in my view, that the explicit discovery of what Dionysos and the Crucified have in common and what separates them occurs so shortly before his final breakdown. Nietzsche's devotees try to empty his insanity of all meaning. We can understand perfectly why. The nonsense of madness plays a protective role in their thought just as madness itself functions for Nietzsche. Nietzsche the philosopher was unable to sit back comfortably in the monstrosities into which the need to minimize his discovery was driving him. And so he took refuge in madness. (loc 2745)

Pretty based to claim that Nietzsche went mad in discovering one of the tenets of Girard's thesis

Nietzsche is the author of the only texts capable of clarifying the Nazi horror. If there is a spiritual essence of the movement, Nietzsche is the one who expresses it. (loc 2775)

Since the Holocaust, however, it is no longer possible to blame Jews. The intellectuals and other cultural elites have promoted Christianity to the role of number one scapegoat. Everyone goes into ecstasy over the airy, wholesome, athletic character of Greek civilization, as against the supposedly closed, suspicious, dull, and repressive atmosphere of the Jewish and Christian world. (loc 2834)

The most powerful anti-Christian movement is the one that takes over and "radicalizes" the concern for victims in order to paganize it. The powers and principalities want to be "revolutionary" now, and they reproach Christianity for not defending victims with enough ardor. In Christian history they see nothing but persecutions, acts of oppression, inquisitions. (loc 2850)

See Girard's lectures on wokeness and cancel culture. Cancel culture is another way for the mob to pursue its bloodlust.

If I had to name the single epistemic feat at which modern human civilization is most adequate, the peak of all human power of estimation, I would unhesitatingly reply, "Short-term relative pricing of liquid financial assets, like the price of S&P 500 stocks relative to other S&P 500 stocks over the next three months." This is something into which human civilization puts an actual effort. (loc 141)

Theoretically, a liquid market should be just exploitable enough to pay competent professionals the same hourly rate as their next-best opportunity. (loc 161)

This is formalised in Efficiently Inefficient

What people hear when you talk about "efficient prices" is that a cold-blooded machine has determined that some people ought to be paid $9/hour. And they hear the economist saying nice things about the machine, praising it as "efficient," implying that the machine is right about this $9/hour price being good for society, (loc 337)

A market that knows everything you know is a market where prices are "efficient" in the conventional economic sense—one where you can't predict the net direction in which the price will change. This means that the efficiency of a market is assessed relative to your own intelligence, which is fine. Indeed, it's possible that the concept should be called "relative efficiency." (loc 349)

Today's markets may not be efficient relative to the smartest hedge fund managers, or efficient relative to corporate insiders with secret knowledge that hasn't yet leaked. But the stock markets are efficient relative to you, and to me, (loc 354)

If you want to outperform—if you want to do anything not usually done—then you'll need to conceptually divide our civilization into areas of lower and greater competency. My view is that this is best done from a framework of incentives and the equilibria of those incentives—which is to say, from the standpoint of microeconomics. (loc 272)

The startup equity market was inefficient (a price underwent a predictable decline), but it wasn't exploitable. (loc 364)

We can see the notion of an inexploitable market as generalizing the notion of an efficient market as follows: in both cases, there's no free energy inside the system. In both markets, there's a horde of hungry organisms moving around trying to eat up all the free energy. (loc 391)

Efficiency: "Microsoft's stock price is neither too low nor too high, relative to anything you can possibly know about Microsoft's stock price."

Inexploitability: "Some houses and housing markets are overpriced, but you can't make a profit by short-selling them, and you're unlikely to find any substantially underpriced houses—the market as a whole isn't rational, but it contains participants who have money and understand housing markets as well as you do."

Adequacy: "Okay, the medical sector is a wildly crazy place where different interventions have orders-of-magnitude differences in cost-effectiveness, but at least there's no well-known but unused way to save ten thousand lives for just ten dollars each, right? Somebody would have picked up on it! Right?!" (loc 434)

usually, when things suck, it's because they suck in a way that's a Nash equilibrium. (loc 494)

In a system like academia, the competition for free energy may not correspond to anything good from your own standpoint, and as a result you may label the outcome "inadequate"; but there is still no free energy. (loc 523)

there's usually a deeper reason than "nobody thought of it." (loc 583)

See also Chesterton's Fence

I shall, somewhat arbitrarily, sort these concepts into three larger categories:

• Decisionmakers who are not beneficiaries
• Asymmetric information
• Nash equilibria that aren't even the best Nash equilibrium, let alone Pareto-optimal.

In other words:

• Cases where the decision lies in the hands of people who would gain little personally, or lose out personally, if they did what was necessary to help someone else;
• Cases where decision-makers can't reliably learn the information they need to make decisions, even though someone else has that information;
• Systems that are broken in multiple places so that no one actor can make them better, even though, in principle, some magically coordinated action could move to a new stable state. (loc 693)

Universities pay attention to prestigious journals because of a signaling equilibrium, which, in our taxonomy, is a kind of bad Nash equilibrium that no single actor can defy unilaterally. In your terms, it involves a sticky, stable equilibrium of everyone acting insane in a way that's secretly a sane response to everyone else acting insane. (loc 873)

on a larger scale, what we're seeing is an extra stickiness that results when the incentive to try an innovation requires you to believe that other people will believe the innovation will work. An equilibrium like that can be much stickier than a scenario where, if you believe that a project will succeed, you have an incentive to try it even if other people expect the project to fail. (loc 1223)

Systems are harder to improve when they rely on collective belief in the improvement, because there is a kind of bootstrapping problem.

In reality, the multi-stage nature of venture capital makes it very easy for the field to end up pinned to traditions about whether entrepreneurs ought to have red hair—not because everyone believes it, but because everyone believes that everyone believes it. (loc 1227)

The Nash equilibrium isn't an illusion. Individuals would do worse by playing away from that Nash equilibrium. Wasted votes are wasted. The current system is an effective trap and the voters are trapped. They can't just wish their way out of that trap. (loc 1302)

Every possible dysfunction is competing against every other possible dysfunction to explain the observed data. Sloppy cynicism will usually be wrong, (loc 1623)

I worry, however, that many people end up misusing and overapplying the "outside view" concept very soon after they learn about it, and that a lot of people tie too much of their mental conception of what good reasoning looks like to the stereotype of the humble empiricist fox. (loc 1931)

the message of "distrust theorizing" had become so strong that Founder 1 had stopped trying to model users in detail and thought it was futile to make an advance prediction. (loc 1985)

reference class tennis—both parties get stuck insisting that their own "outside view" is the correct one, based on diverging intuitions about what similarities are relevant. (loc 2073)

the essence of rationality is to adapt to whatever world you find yourself in, rather than to be "humble" or "arrogant" a priori. (loc 2344)

overcompensation after being warned about a cognitive bias is also a recognized problem in the literature; (loc 2382)

"Try to make sure you'd arrive at different beliefs in different worlds." You don't want to think in such a way that you wouldn't believe in a conclusion in a world where it were true, just because a fallacious argument could support it. (loc 2529)

Finally, consider appeals to [Aumann] agreement. As a matter of probability theory, perfect rationality plus mutual understanding often entails perfect agreement. Yet it doesn't follow from this that the way for human beings to become more rational is to try their best to minimize disagreement […]
Whether applied selectively or consistently, the temptation of modesty is to "fake" Aumann agreement—to rush the process, rather than waiting until you and others can actually rationally converge upon the same views. The temptation is to call an early halt to risky lines of inquiry, to not claim to know too much, and to not claim to aspire to too much; all while wielding a fully general argument against anyone who doesn't do the same. (loc 2607)

Aumann Agreement can be abused to enforce agreement quickly

if you're trying to do something unusually well (a common enough goal for ambitious scientists, entrepreneurs, and effective altruists), then this will often mean that you need to seek out the most neglected problems. You'll have to make use of information that isn't widely known or accepted, and pass into relatively uncharted waters. And modesty is especially detrimental for that kind of work, because it discourages acting on private information, making less-than-certain bets, and breaking new ground. (loc 2688)

Strong views, weakly held.

Certainly, that young man was a true product of Cambridge at its best – nobody can have any doubt about it who ever met him […]. In discussion he impressed one curiously like an overgrown two-year-old who misbehaves on the race-course from sheer excess of powers (p. xxiv)
…
One of the ways in which Ramsey was so special – and radical – was that he saw it as a mark of good theory that it be "realistic" or able to make a difference in practice. […] Ramsey dispensed with myth and metaphor and instead placed human beings – 'finite, fallible, and yet extraordinarily functional' – at the heart of his theories. (p. xxvi)
…
he would become the singular mind who could engage each of those great thinkers – Keynes, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein – on their own terms. There would be simply no one else who could do that, including these four themselves. (p. 54)
…
The border country was indeed Ramsey's territory. He roamed freely over philosophy, mathematics, logic, probability theory, and economics. Perhaps no one would ever again do so with such intelligence and skill. (p. 112)
…
"When the Economic Journal celebrated its 125th anniversary with a special edition in 2015, both of Ramsey's papers were included. That is, […] one of the world's best journals of economics decided that two of its thirteen most important papers were written by Frank Ramsey when he was twenty-five years old. (p. 307).
…

[in an Apostles debate about the value of abstract theory vs concrete political action, Ramsey says] Deteriora sequor [reference to Ovid]: I see the high way, but follow the low way (p. 101)
…
"We must not too frequently ask ourselves or discuss with one another whether we are happy. We must live spontaneously, only scrutinising ourselves at infrequent intervals. Otherwise we run the danger of destroying our pleasure by immediately analysing it." Even after he had been cured by psychoanalysis, Ramsey would be wary of the constant self scrutiny that Freudians seemed to require (p. 226).
…
"Where I seem to differ from some of my friends is in attaching little importance to physical size. I don't feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does. I take no credit for weighing nearly seventeen stone.

My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits. I don't really believe in astronomy, except as a complicated description of part of the course of human and possibly animal sensation. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time. In time the world will cool and everything will die; but that is a long time off still, and its present value at compound discount is almost nothing. Nor is the present less valuable because the future will be blank. Humanity, which fills the foreground of my picture, I find interesting and on the whole admirable. I find, just now at least, the world a pleasant and exciting place.

You may find it depressing; I am sorry for you, and you despise me. But I have reason and you have none; you would only have a reason for despising me if your feeling corresponded to the fact in a way mine didn't. But neither can correspond to the fact. The fact is not in itself good or bad; it is just that it thrills me but depresses you. On the other hand, I pity you with reason, because it is pleasanter to be thrilled than to be depressed, and not merely pleasanter but better for all one's activities." (p. 218)
…
Human beings do not work the way ideal utilitarian theory has it, nor is there any value in trying to identity rationality with 'the opinion of an ideal person in similar circumstances'. To be sure, 'the highest ideal would be always to have a true opinion and be certain of it'; but 'this ideal is more suited to God than to man'. And Ramsey did not think that God existed. (p. 278)
…

[Fichte] "a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we can reject or accept as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it (p. xxix)
…
[Ramsey] thought that probability is multi-dimensional: it is measurable and psychological, though not merely psychological, and at times we require a non-psychological frequency account of it. (p. 117)
…
Ramsey thought psychology should be scientific – a theory that aims at 'laying down the foundations' and getting the facts about human motivation right. […]. He saw Freud's theory of the mind, on which submerged desires find their outlet in dreams, neuroses, and unhappiness, as one that seemed to work in practice. (p. 223)
…
"The chief danger to our philosophy, apart from laziness and wooziness, is scholasticism, the essence of which is treating what is vague as if it were precise and trying to fit it into an exact logical category" (p. 277)
…

[Wittgenstein's Viva] After a short discussion, the exam ended amicably with Wittgenstein putting an arm on each of his examiners' shoulders and saying 'Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it'
…
"Our world is therefore a vague one and the precise is a fiction" (p. 362)
…

Being a person, however, is something that humans do; it's a way of relating to the world understandingly. In Being and Time Heidegger interrogates the activity of being a person [there-being/dasein] because only that activity discloses Being (using a hammer as a hammer, for instance, discloses the Being of the hammer, and the Being of a person, in a way that seeing, touching, hearing, smelling or taking it apart does not). (loc 68)

There-being [being a person] is an activity over time that involves engaging with the world in terms of possibilities for existing in different ways - as a builder, teacher, criminal, layabout, patriot, farmer, or whatever. Because these possibilities are open to you, and you have to constantly be choosing at least one at the expense of others, you care about them and who you are being is a issue for you. The way you act over time, as a potentiality to whom possibilities in the world matter, discloses there-being (loc 88)

The essence of any entity is that without which it could not be the entity it is. The essence of things is a set of material or conceptual structures. The essence of being a person, however, is a way of relating to possibilities from among which you choose some at the expense of others. This way of relating to the world is existence. (loc 127)

Dissecting anything doesn't disclose its Being so much obscure it (close it off). Even something as simple as a hammer loses its Being as a hammer (its character as a tool for banging things) if you dissect it into a head and a handle. (loc 102)

The traditional picture of a person as some kind of soul, consciousness or other thing-like essence, obscures the truth that (1) you need a world in which to be a person, (2) a particular way of being in the world is essential to being a person, and (3) the Being of the world, its components, and yourself, is an issue for you. (loc 111)
…
That persons are potentialities-for-being, who need ongoing possibilities to actualise simply to exist as persons, is one of the key insights of Being and Time. This insight matters particularly because humans chronically misdefine their Being as persons in terms of actualities - who you are is thought to be fixed by your biological or 'spiritual' constitution, race, gender, star sign, career, social class, or whatever. (loc 187)

Those are categorial, rather than existential comments.

Having to choose an existence is why you Care. Knowledge arises from [is founded on] caring about your existence, so knowledge about the world is not your founding mode of being a person in the world - Care is. (loc 270)

You disclose meaning of entities in the world by projecting your potentiality-for-being onto them. This projection not only discloses the Being of the entity but also your own there-being as a person. (loc 1291)

reflection is a deficient (qv) mode of circumspection in which you dis-engage yourself from being-in the world; you, in effect, 'stand back' and consider objects of attention as present-at-hand (loc 344)

If, for example, if you use a brush for painting then that use discloses its Being [its meaningful character as equipment]. But if you reflect on the brush when it is not being used for any existence-related purpose then its Being is obscured [closed off]. (loc 349)

If you tend to notice the Being of objects only in a reflective state, when they are detached from their everyday Being, then what you think that you have disclosed is not, in fact, the authentic Being of the object (disclosing a brush as bristles and a handle is not the same as disclosing its Being as equipment for painting
[…]
you not only lose sight of their Being but also of your Being as a person who uses equipment for-the-sake-of an existence by which you realise yourself as one kind of person or another. (loc 390)

Don't think too abstractly about things! Engage authentically with the Being of objects, because that helps disclose your Being as possibility.

sighting your lover across a crowded space brings her closer to you than people you don't care about who are actually touching you as they pass. This closeness is achieved by the way that Care de-severs you from the normal remoteness of objects. (loc 469)

place is where sets of related equipment belong in the arrangement of your working environment. The place for kitchen utensils, for example, is in a kitchen. Having a place is different from being at certain navigational coordinates because it has to do with equipment having a function. (loc 473)

self-subsistence is an activity undertaken by an entity that maintains itself as itself in a world and over time. As potentiality-for-being your self is characterised by your personality and history but cannot itself be reduced to either. (loc 506)

Being-with is the fact that being-one's-self always and essentially entails the influence of other persons. […]
Being beside, being alone, being away from, or being missing, are all derived from being-with. The only reason that you can feel alone, for example, is because being-with others is primordial and being alone is a deficient [derived] mode of being-with. (loc 526)

The influence that others have on you is that of what Heidegger calls 'they'. The 'they' is not a particular set of people so much as a set of communal values to which groups of persons conform […]
The 'they' is not the 'them' of an 'us or them' dichotomy but the 'us'; it is the abstract 'everyone' of "Everyone knows..." acting as an influence. (loc 542)

Publicness is internalised averageness; an unknowingly self-inflicted conformity and levelling down which dominates your existence. It is the set of 'normal' assumptions, beliefs and attitudes which dictates the process of being-one's-self in ways, and to an extent of which, folk are normally unaware
…
Publicness informs your being-one's-self to such an extent that the normal human person is a they-self; that is, a self that maintains itself by being absorbed in everyday life and believing 'they'. The they-self is still being-in-the-world but does not own its existence in an understanding of what it is to be-in-the-world authentically. We are all normally a they-self simply because we are and have to be-with the 'they' just to get along as persons in the world. (loc 577)

Thrownness is the fact of finding yourself landed with the task of being someone you didn't choose to be in a geographical, social, and historical, world that you didn't choose to be-in. […]
You have to live with being this person at this time and place; you are the person that you are, at the time and place you are, whether you like it or not. Your mood discloses the Being of this 'having to' as you have experienced it so far. (loc 611)

Potentiality-for-being contrasts with facticity - which is your actuality as an already-defined being; facticity derives from the past while potentiality is being-towards the future. Potentiality-for-being is a primordial and defining feature of being-in-the-world a person, and is the reason why there-being is always more than its present facticity. (loc 656)

In your average everyday mode of being a person you maintain yourself as a they-self (qv). So articulating average everydayness entails asking how the they-self exists - a task which also entails asking why humans are normally so unaware of their own Being. Heidegger answers this last question in terms of idle talk, curiosity, ambiguity, and falling. (loc 780)

Novelty-seeking [curiosity] is the restless [turbulent, qv] search for new objects of interest as a distraction from the burden of authentically being-in-the-world for ourselves. (loc 836)

There is no ethical implication to the term 'inauthentic' - no suggestion that the inauthentic life is somehow inferior to an authentic one. All existence is fundamentally 'inauthentic' [un-owner-like] because it is inevitably defined to a great extent by the culture, society, and everydayness within which it is lived. The only issue with existing 'inauthentically' [within a community], as we all do, it that it obscures the personal aspects of there-being that Heidegger seeks. (loc 866)

Fallenness is the normal (inauthentic) mode of everyday existence in which persons fall into the everyday world and being-with others to the extent that we no longer sight (qv) of our being-in-the-world as potentiality-for-being. (loc 871)

Fallenness is tempting, in good part, because authentic being-in-the-world entails anxiety (qv) and the average intelligibility of being-fallen 'tranquillises' us. Tranquillising is the way in which our being-with 'they' replaces anxiety with confidence. 'They' know everything; if a problem threatens then 'they' will come up with some solution - all we have to do is wait for 'they' to work it out and tell us what it (loc 899)

In self-entanglement you picture your Being as thingish and try to figure out the thing you supposedly are in order to disclose its Being. Becoming fascinated with 'discovering' ourselves is a perennially popular diversion from the inconvenience and uncertainty of having to be-in-the-world as a potentiality. (loc 910)
…
Anxiety individualises you not as a specific actuality but as a specific potentiality (a 'no thing') that has to define an actual character for itself by existing in one way or another. This calls you to make up your mind ['take a stand' or be resolute, qv] about how you are going to exist rather than drifting along in everydayness. (loc 952)

Heidegger calls the disturbing feeling of not being 'at home' in the world being 'unheimlich' ['un-home-like'] The German unheimlich is usually translated as 'spooky' or 'eerie' but is rendered as 'uncanniness' in the best extant English translation of Being and Time. Uncanniness describes how being-in-the-world feels to us when stripped of its comfortable and familiar covering. (loc 957)

Care is enacted in and as all the aspects of there-being which we have looked at so far. It is, for example, Care which explains both moods and understanding because if you didn't care then you wouldn't be affected by the world and wouldn't be motivated to understand it. Care also explains the difference between things ready-to-hand (those that immediately matter to us) and present-at-hand (those that do not immediately matter to us). (loc 966)

Care has three temporal aspects (the 'Care structure'). Who you have been as Care (thrownness) is being-already-in (qv), who you will be as Care (projection) is being-ahead (qv), and who you are being as Care (fallenness) is being-alongside (qv). This three-part structure comes about because, for persons, caring in the present is always bound up with caring about the past and future. The tripartite temporal structure of Care is primordial to being a person because there is nothing under, behind or more primitive than Care when it comes to explaining the meaning of why persons exist as the do. If anxiety discloses your Being as Care, and Care is inescapably temporal ('stretched across the future, past, and present') then anxiety shows you the essential temporality of being a person. (loc 975)

Temporality is an existential phenomenon whereby being-in-the-world as Care requires (a) ordering existence into 'has been', 'is being' and 'will be', and (b) holding the past and future together in the present. (loc 984)

The temporal structure of Care matches the temporal structure of your there-being as mood, understanding and fallenness. Your mood is being-towards having been thrown into being-in-the-world as inherited from the past. Understanding is being-towards the future as projective. While fallenness is being-towards the everyday present. The simultaneity of these is shown in existence (loc 988)

As thrown projection, you are an integrity of actuality (the thrown) and potentiality (the projective). This integrity is temporal because who you are in the present is defined by who you have been in the past while you project your potentiality into a future by your present choices. (loc 997)

for persons, to whom life is the ever-present possibility of possibilities, death impends as the ever-present possibility of impossibility. […]
being-towards the ever-present possibility of impossibility dramatically highlights your being-towards all your existential possibilities. In other words, an authentic being-towards-death provokes an authentic being-towards existence. (loc 1092)

'they' are also a kind of oppression that doesn't allow authentic being-towards-death. Authenticity is suppressed so that the cultivation of a supposed indifference to death alienates us from our ownmost, non-relational, potentiality-for-being - we do not face death, which requires courage, but turn our faces away from it. This evasion of death is inauthentic. (loc 1115)

Anticipation is a response to being thrown into death, as the final end to our potentiality, in which we accept death as impending, our ownmost, non-relational and not to be outstripped. We can get a sense of what Heidegger is getting at with anticipation if we think of the way that some folk keep themselves ready to seize certain opportunities when they arise and/or make the most of their fleeting opportunities while they exist. So, far from making life pointless, authentic being-towards-death offers support for becoming intent on something. (loc 1139)

your conscience is experienced as a kind of call that summons you to be responsible for some aspect of your own existence. To speak of conscience as a 'call' implies the existence of a caller - the 'someone' who is addressing you. The call of conscience originates within you, but the caller is obviously not who you are as a they-self; after all, conscience 'calls' against the expectations and wishes of the they-self; it 'speaks' to you individually but tells you what you don't want to hear. […]
the 'caller' in conscience is your own Being as the anxious potentiality-for-being from which you are hiding in everydayness. (loc 1169)
…
If you take ownership of your own being-in-the-world, however, fallenness drops away and you disclose an authentic state-of-mind (readiness for anxiety), an authentic understanding (self-projection upon your own potentiality for being responsible), and an authentic discourse (reticence). Reticence is a disinclination to join in or listen to 'they'. Where a they-self is all too willing to indulge endless idle talk, Heidegger predicts that the authentic self would be reticent [stilled by conscience]. (loc 1224)

Resoluteness is a matter of acting as a responsible potentiality-for-being 'within the concrete situation' rather than letting fallenness, wishing or a 'they' dictate how you exist. As such, it is the authentic alternative to the normally irresoluteness [turbulence, qv] of being a they-self; you make up your mind about your values, and stick to them, rather than going along with whatever is convenient and/or popular. (loc 1236)

Only by being-in-the-world authentically [resolutely] do you truly disclose your actual Situation (upper case 'S'); that is, the definite range of actual possibilities which become the world in which you are authentic. Existing authentically would be quite contrary to the kind of detachment from the world which many 'spiritual' superstitions teach - we wouldn't move 'out' of the world but from being lost in the they-world to being solidly located in the actual world. (loc 1246)

The they-self doesn't own its choices and so doesn't disclose the temporality of knowingly choosing for the future, right now [in the present], as you have been up until this point. Authenticity entails resoluteness which, in turn, discloses a tripartite temporality (i.e., simultaneously being-towards the future, past and present). (loc 1311)

the past, present and future do not come in a succession; the future is not 'later' than your 'now' and your past is not 'earlier'. Rather, they are all present in your experience at the same time. For a present sound to be part of a song, for instance, it must be integrated with what has been and what is to come (melodies exist only over time). (loc 1325)

4.1 Temporality and Everydayness (loc 1339)
The normal, inauthentic, human way of being-towards the future is one of merely awaiting it. Awaiting is a passive, and inauthentic, alternative to anticipation. Anticipation is a matter of actively 'meeting' the future in the present where, in awaiting, you simply let the future come towards you. You are, in effect, postponing your own potentiality-for-being. (loc 1375)

In contrast with making present, authentic temporalising of the present involves 'now' being 'the moment of vision' - the time when you actively encounter your actual possibilities. 'Moment of vision' is a phrase used by Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) to describe what the present becomes if you sight (qv) it as the location of actual possibilities and, therefore, of authentic choice. (loc 1394)

You cannot be-towards the present authentically (treating it as a moment of vision) without simultaneously being-towards who you have been up until the present moment; you must own the past as something which is not under your control but still constitutive of who you are. What this amounts to is repeatedly coming back to the existence that you have chosen for yourself. This 'coming back' to a chosen existence is repetition - of being loyal to your past resolutions. If you are resolute then, rather than letting your self be tossed around by circumstances (qv, turbulence) you knowingly choose to keep repeating who you have chosen to be. (loc 1399)

the link by which temporality is the meaning of Care - is best disclosed in resoluteness because resoluteness has to do with understanding your Being as Care. This understanding in turn presupposes an openness to temporality because any resoluteness is being-towards a future character which you have decided to be as you who have been so far. To this linking of future and past, resoluteness further discloses the current moment of your existence and presupposes your openness to it; so the present is its existential context (loc 1302)

The resoluteness with which you exist authentically is a matter of taking personal responsibility for what you do with your historical Situation; you, in effect, 'take over' your past and hand it down to yourself as an inheritance. (loc 1424)

Your past is fixed, but your Fate - your confrontation with the past - is something you can variously accept, avoid, or distort. (loc 1432)

An ontology (qv) is a theory of Being. Everybody has an ontology, but most human ontologies are functional rather than theoretical; we simply act as if an ontology was true rather than thinking through its implications (loc 1477)

Dualism is the ontological or pre-ontological belief that reality consists of two kinds of Being: the material [natural, objective] and the immaterial or non-natural [spiritual, cultural, mental, subjective]. This has its roots in ancient religion and probably arose from the uncanniness (qv) that early humans must have felt by being conscious of the world and, therefore, of being somehow 'other' than from the world (loc 1480)

The knowability problem, which seems inescapable for dualism, led to what Kant called 'the scandal of philosophy' by which dualists (i.e., most humans) cannot prove the existence of an external world. (loc 1488)

Idealism is a deficient (qv) mode of Dualism which concludes that, because only the subjective/mental aspect of reality is knowably real, either only the subjective is real (ontological idealism) or, at least only subjective experience can be talked about as true (epistemological idealism). So idealism is actually idea-ism (the root is idea rather than ideal). Idealism 'solves' both the mind-body and knowability (loc 1509)

[Intentionality] You have only to pay attention to your own being-in-the-world to notice that all awareness is awareness by you of something, (loc 1543)

Husserl's phenomenology sought to overcome this dualism by focussing on the intentional act whereby the subject is 'in' the world. When you are conscious of your computer, for instance, you are not conscious of an image in your head but of an object in the world. (loc 1568)

The awkward thing about history is that bias seems an essential element in it – even in the best of history. The fact is that the facts do not, as is sometimes said, 'speak for themselves', or if they do it is the historian who decides which facts shall speak – he cannot give the floor to them all (loc 587)

When Ranke in the 1830s, in legitimate protest against moralizing history, remarked that the task of the historian was 'simply to show how it really was (wie es eigentlich gewesen)', this not very profound aphorism had an astonishing success. (loc 1082)

First ascertain the facts, said the Positivists, then draw your conclusions from them. In Great Britain, this view of history fitted in perfectly with the empiricist tradition which was the dominant strain in British philosophy from Locke to Bertrand Russell. The empirical theory of knowledge presupposes a complete separation between subject and object. Facts, like sense-impressions, impinge on the observer from outside, and are independent of his consciousness. The process of reception is passive: having received the data, he then acts on them. (loc 1086)

The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, (loc 1131)

Our picture of Greece in the fifth century B.C. is defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens. (loc 1154)

All history is 'contemporary history', declared Croce; meaning that history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in the light of its problems, (loc 1263)

In 1910 the American historian, Carl Becker, argued in deliberately provocative language that 'the facts of history do not exist for any historian till he creates them'. (loc 1266)

As any working historian knows, if he stops to reflect on what he is doing as he thinks and writes, the historian is engaged on a continuous process of moulding his facts to his interpretation and his interpretation to his facts. It is impossible to assign primacy to one over the other. (loc 1395)

My first answer therefore to the question, What is History?, is that it is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past. (loc 1402)

Suicide is the only perfectly free act open to individual man; every other act involves in one way or another his membership of society. (loc 1421)

According to the familiar account in Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the second part of which is subtitled 'The Development of the Individual', the cult of the individual began with the Renaissance, when man, who had hitherto been 'conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation', at length 'became a spiritual individual and recognized himself as such'. Later the cult was connected with the rise of capitalism and of Protestantism, with the beginnings of the industrial revolution and with the doctrines of laissez-faire. The rights of man and the citizen proclaimed by the French revolution were the rights of the individual. Individualism was the basis of the great nineteenth-century philosophy of utilitarianism. Morley's essay On Compromise, a characteristic document of Victorian liberalism, called individualism and utilitarianism 'the religion of human happiness and well-being'. 'Rugged individualism' was the keynote of human progress. (loc 1441)

Great history is written precisely when the historian's vision of the past is illuminated by insights into the problems of the present. (loc 1498)

two important truths: first, that you cannot fully understand or appreciate the work of the historian unless you have first grasped the standpoint from which he himself approached it; secondly, that that standpoint is itself rooted in a social and historical background. (loc 1533)

Man's capacity to rise above his social and historical situation seems to be conditioned by the sensitivity with which he recognizes the extent of his involvement in it. (loc 1599)

In my first lecture I said: Before you study the history, study the historian. Now I would add: Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment. The historian, being an individual, is also a product of history and of society; and it is in this twofold light that the student of history must learn to regard him. (loc 1601)

It is easier to call communism 'the brain-child of Karl Marx' (I pluck this flower from a recent stockbrokers' circular) than to analyse its origin and character, to attribute the Bolshevik revolution to the stupidity of Nicholas II or to German gold than to study its profound social causes, and to see in the two world wars of this century the result of the individual wickedness of Wilhelm II and Hitler rather than of some deep-seated breakdown in the system of international relations. (loc 1632)

as I am concerned, I have no belief in Divine Providence, World Spirit, Manifest Destiny, History with a capital H, or any other of the abstractions which have sometimes been supposed to guide the course of events; and I should endorse without qualification the comment of Marx: History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights. (loc 1667)

The great man is an individual, and, being an outstanding individual, is also a social phenomenon of outstanding importance. […]
The view which I would hope to discourage is the view which places great men outside history and sees them as imposing themselves on history in virtue of their greatness, as 'jack-in-the-boxes who emerge miraculously from the unknown to interrupt the real continuity of history'.32 Even today I do not know that we can better Hegel's classic description: The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it. What he does is the heart and essence of his age; he actualizes his age. (loc 1745)

the higher degree of creativity may perhaps be assigned to those great men who, like Cromwell or Lenin, helped to mould the forces which carried them to greatness, rather than to those who, like Napoleon or Bismarck, rode to greatness on the back of already existing forces. (loc 1753)

To enable man to understand the society of the past and to increase his mastery over the society of the present is the dual function of history. (loc 1765)

Aristotle, who declared that poetry was 'more philosophical' and 'more serious' than history, since poetry was concerned with general truth and history with particular. (loc 1863)

The historian, as we have seen, is bound to generalize; and, in so doing, he provides general guides for future action which, though not specific predictions, are both valid and useful. But he cannot predict specific events, because the specific is unique and because the element of accident enters into (loc 1955)

I should now like to argue that the social sciences as a whole, since they involve man as both subject and object, both investigator and thing investigated, are incompatible with any theory of knowledge which pronounces a rigid divorce between subject and object. (loc 2021)

History is movement; and movement implies comparison. That is why historians tend to express their moral judgments in words of a comparative nature like 'progressive' and 'reactionary' rather than in uncompromising absolutes like 'good' and 'bad'; these are attempts to define different societies or historical phenomena not in relation to some absolute standard, but in their relation to one another. (loc 2169)

the concept of absolute truth is also not appropriate to the world of history – or, I suspect, to the world of science. It is only the simplest kind of historical statement that can be adjudged absolutely true or absolutely false. At a more sophisticated level, the historian who contests, say, the verdict of one of his predecessors will normally condemn it, not as absolutely false, but as inadequate or one-sided or misleading, or the product of a point of view which has been rendered obsolete or irrelevant by later evidence. To say that the Russian revolution was due to the stupidity of Nicholas II or to the genius of Lenin is altogether inadequate – so inadequate as to be altogether misleading. But it cannot be called absolutely false. The historian does not deal in absolutes of this kind. (loc 2691)

In reflexive systems "true" and "false" are not exhaustive.

The great historian – or perhaps I should say more broadly, the great thinker – is the man who asks the question, Why?, about new things or in new contexts. Herodotus, the father of history, defined his purpose in the opening of his work: to preserve a memory of the deeds of the Greeks and the barbarians, 'and in particular, beyond everything else, to give the cause of their fighting one another'. (loc 2220)

the historian is known by the causes which he invokes. Gibbon attributed the decline and fall of the Roman Empire to the triumph of barbarism and religion. The English Whig historians of the nineteenth century attributed the rise of British power and prosperity to the development of political institutions embodying the principles of constitutional liberty. Gibbon and the English nineteenth-century historians have an old-fashioned look today because they ignore the economic causes which modern historians have moved into the forefront. (loc 2260)

Just as from the infinite ocean of facts the historian selects those which are significant for his purpose, so from the multiplicity of sequences of cause and effect he extracts those, and only those, which are historically significant; and the standard of historical significance is his ability to fit them into his pattern of rational explanation and interpretation. Other sequences of cause and effect have to be rejected as accidental, not because the relation between cause and effect is different, but because the sequence itself is irrelevant. The historian can do nothing with it; it is not amenable to rational interpretation, and has no meaning either for the past or the present. It is true that Cleopatra's nose, or Bajazet's gout, or Alexander's monkey-bite, or Lenin's death, or Robinson's cigarette-smoking, had results. But it makes no sense as a general proposition to say that generals lose battles because they are infatuated with beautiful queens, or that wars occur because kings keep pet monkeys, or that people get run over and killed on the roads because they smoke cigarettes. (loc 2477)

The notion of a finite and clearly definable goal of progress in history, so often postulated by nineteenth-century thinkers, has proved inapplicable and barren. Belief in progress means belief not in any automatic or inevitable process, but in the progressive development of human potentialities. Progress is an abstract term; and the concrete ends pursued by mankind arise from time to time out of the course of history, not from some source outside it. (loc 2673)

Hegel over Whig

Hegel clothed his absolute in the mystical shape of a world spirit, and made the cardinal error of bringing the course of history to an end in the present instead of projecting it into the future. He recognized a process of continuous evolution in the past, and incongruously denied it in the future. Those who, since Hegel, have reflected most deeply on the nature of history have seen in it a synthesis of past and future. (loc 2717)

Hegel was none the less the philosopher of the French revolution, the first philosopher to see the essence of reality in historical change and in the development of man's consciousness of himself. (loc 2925)

Herzen's description of Hegel's doctrines as 'the algebra of revolution' was singularly apt. Hegel provided the notation, but gave it no practical content. It was left for Marx to write the arithmetic into Hegel's algebraical equations. (loc 2929)

What Freud did was to extend the range of our knowledge and understanding by opening up the unconscious roots of human behaviour to consciousness and to rational enquiry. This was an extension of the domain of reason, an increase in man's power to understand and control himself, and therefore his environment; and it represents a revolutionary and progressive achievement. In this respect, Freud complements, and does not contradict, the work of Marx. (loc 2966)

some historians write history which is more durable, and has more of this ultimate and objective character, than others; and these are the historians who have what I may call a long-term vision over the past and over the future. The historian of the past can make an approach towards objectivity only as he approaches towards the understanding of the future. (loc 2741)

The historian's interpretation of the past, his selection of the significant and the relevant, evolves with the progressive emergence of new goals. To take the simplest of all illustrations, so long as the main goal appeared to be the organization of constitutional liberties and political rights, the historian interpreted the past in constitutional and political terms. When economic and social ends began to replace constitutional and political ends, historians turned to economic and social interpretation of the past. (loc 2745)

Progress in history is achieved through the interdependence and interaction of facts and values. The objective historian is the historian who penetrates most deeply into this reciprocal process. (loc 2856)

A clue to this problem of facts and values is provided by our ordinary use of the word 'truth' – a word which straddles the world of fact and the world of value and is made up of elements of both. Nor is this an idiosyncrasy of the English language. The words for truth in the Latin languages, the German Wahrheit, the Russian pravda, all possess this dual character. Every language appears to require this word for a truth which is not merely a statement of fact and not merely a value judgment, but embraces both elements. It may be a fact that I went to London last week. But you would not ordinarily call it a truth: (loc 2858)

The primary function of reason, as applied to man in society, is no longer merely to investigate, but to transform; and this heightened consciousness of the power of man to improve the management of his social, economic and political affairs by the application of rational processes seems to me one of the major aspects of the twentieth-century revolution. (loc 3020)

While the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. […] such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city posses […] your labour which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave

the paradox of desire and fulfilment. The effort to achieve our desires shapes them, but in working to achieve them, our desires are altered.
…
It is pointless to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

As with Anastasia – giving form to desire modifies the form of desire.
…
[Eusapia – where the living world is mimicked by the dead]
Every time [the hooded brothers] go below, they find something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their city […]
And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead. So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy.
They say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead
…
If you ask, "Why is Thekla's construction taking such a long time?" The inhabitants […] answer "So that its destruction cannot begin".
…
Summed to lay down the rules for the foundation of Perinthia, the astronomers established the place and the day according to the position of the stars; they drew the intersecting lines of the decumanus and the cardo, the first oriented to the passage of the sun and the other like the axis on which the heavens turn. They divided the map according to the twelve houses of the zodiac so that each temple and each neighborhood would receive the proper influence of the favoring constellations; they fixed the point in the walls where gates should be cut, foreseeing how each would frame an eclipse of the moon in the next thousand years. Perinthia they guaranteed - would reflect the harmony of the firmament; nature's reason and the gods' benevolence would shape the inhabitants' destinies.
Following the astronomers' calculations precisely, Perinthia was constructed; various peoples came to populate it; the first generation born in Perinthia began to grow within its walls; and these citizens reached the age to marry and have children.
In Perinthia's streets and square today you encounter cripples, dwarfs, hunchbacks, obese men, bearded women. But the worse cannot be seen; guttural howls are heard from cellars and lofts, where families hide children with three heads or with six legs.
Perinthia's astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is reflected exactly in the city of monsters.
…
"In Raissa, Life is not happy". People wring their hand as they walk in the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their firsts to the temples.
In Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels and then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.
…
"Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly," they answered, "that any change in Andria involves some novelty among the stars." The astronomers, after each change takes place in Andria, peer into their telescopes and report a nova's explosion, or a remote point in the firmament's change of color from orange to yellow, the expansion of a nebula, the bending of a spiral of the Milky Way. Each change implies a sequence of other changes, in Andria as among the stars: the city and the sky never remain the same. As for the character of Andria's inhabitants, two virtues are worth mentioning: self-confidence and prudence. Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky's pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.
…

From now on, I'll describe the cities to you," the Khan had said, "in your journeys you will see if they exist."
But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor.
"And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Kublai said. "It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations."
"I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real."

Reminds me of Hempel's Ravens
…
Polo answers, "Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name"
…
The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the form of cities that do not yet have a form or a name. […] The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has founds its city, new cities will continue to be born.
…

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.
"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."
Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me."
Polo answers: "Without stones there is no arch."

Self reference and whole-is-greater-than-sum-of-parts
…
Khan met him, seated at a chessboard. With a gesture he invited the Venetian to sit opposite him and describe, with the help only of the chessmen, the cities he had visited.
Marco did not lose heart. The Great Khan's chessmen were huge pieces of polished ivory: arranging on the board looming rooks and sulky knights, assembling swarms of pawns, drawing straight or oblique avenues like a queen's progress, Marco recreated the perspectives and the spaces of black and white cities on moonlit nights.
Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords, but no model could stand up to the comparison with the game of chess. Perhaps, instead of racking one's brain to suggest with the ivory pieces' scant help visions which were anyway destined to oblivion, it would suffice to play a game according to the rules, and to consider each successive state of the board as one of the countless forms that the system of forms assembles and destroys.
Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions: he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by the diagonal, passages opened by the bishop's incursions, by the lumbering, cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn, by the inexorable ups and downs of every game.
The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game's purpose that eluded him. Each game ends in a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the true stakes?
At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, a black or a white square remains. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness
…
Then Marco Polo spoke: "Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged?
Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night's frost forced it to desist."
Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knew how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not this fluency that amazed him.
"Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum's nest; not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree's being chosen for chopping down... This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding. ..."
The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of wood
…

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.
…
KUBLAI: I do not know when you have had time to visit all the countries you describe to me. It seems to me you have never moved from this garden
POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same penumbra, the same silence streaked by the rustling of leaves.
At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment's pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.
KUBLAI: I, too, am not sure I am here, strolling among the porphyry fountains, listening to the plashing echo, and not riding, caked with sweat and blood, at the head of my army, conquering the lands you will have to describe, or cutting off the fingers of the attackers scaling the walls of a besieged fortress.
POLO: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the fields of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.
…
And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."
…

This book is not about making your money grow—it's about making your life grow. (loc 53)

So it makes sense to delay gratification to some extent, because that pays off in the long run. But the sad truth is that too many people delay gratification for too long, or indefinitely. They put off what they want to do until it's too late, saving money for experiences they will never enjoy. Living as if your life were infinite is the opposite of taking the long view: It's terribly shortsighted. (loc 83)

it makes no sense to let opportunities pass us by for fear of squandering our money. Squandering our lives should be a much greater worry. (loc 98)

increase your overall lifetime fulfillment, it's important to have each experience at the right age. (loc 121)

money represents life energy. Life energy is all the hours that you're alive to do things—and whenever you work, you spend some of that finite life energy. So any amount of money you've earned through your work represents the amount of life energy you spent earning that money. (loc 187)

Experts in retirement planning even have some lingo for this consumption pattern: go-go years, slow-go years, and no-go years. The idea is that when you're first retired, you're raring to have all those experiences you've been putting off until retirement, and you still (for the most part) have the health and energy to pursue those experiences. Those are your go-go years. Later on, typically in your seventies, you begin to slow down as you cross items off your bucket list and your health declines. And later still, in your eighties or beyond, you don't have a whole lot of "go" left at all, no matter how much money you still have. (loc 721)

I'm a big believer in the value of experiences. Experiences don't have to cost a lot of money, and they can even be free, but worthwhile experiences do usually cost some money. The unforgettable trip, the concert tickets, the pursuit of an entrepreneurial dream or a new hobby—all these experiences cost money, and sometimes they cost a lot of money. To me, that is money well worth spending. Many psychological studies have shown that spending money on experiences makes us happier than spending money on things. Unlike material possessions, which seem exciting at the beginning but then often depreciate quickly, experiences actually gain in value over time: They pay what I call a memory dividend, (loc 218)

Recommendation: Start actively thinking about the life experiences you'd like to have, and the number of times you'd like to have them. The experiences can be large or small, free or costly, charitable or hedonistic. But think about what you really want out of this life in terms of meaningful and memorable experiences. (loc 286)

the main thing you'll be retiring on will be your memories—so make sure you invest enough in those. (loc 477)

yes, you can certainly leave money to the people and causes you care about—but the truth is that those people and causes would be better off getting your wealth sooner rather than later. Why wait until after you die? (loc 669)

your real legacy for your kids consists of the experiences you've shared with your children, (loc 1169)

billionaire philanthropist Chuck Feeney calls "giving while living." Feeney, who made his fortune as a founder of Duty Free Shoppers Group (the duty-free stores you see in airports), is a great role model for what I'm advocating: He started giving his money away (anonymously) early, and by the time he was in his eighties he had given away more than $8 billion of his wealth. (loc 1294)

You should be living today in much the way that you'll be living in 10 or 15 years, and it's crazy to actually be scrimping and saving (loc 1325)

Think about the three basics people need to have to get the most out of life: health, free time, and money. The problem is that these things rarely all come together at once. (loc 1521)

If you pay to get out of doing tasks you don't enjoy, you are simultaneously reducing the number of negative life experiences and increasing the number of positive life experiences (for which you now have more time). How can that not make you happier with your life? (loc 1635)

your ability to extract enjoyment from money declines with age? Well, the corollary to that is that the older you are, the more someone should have to pay you to delay an experience. How much they should pay you is what I call your personal interest rate—which rises with your age. This idea immediately hits home for people in finance, who are used to thinking about interest rates and the time value of money. (loc 1643)

Las Vegas at 40 is much better than Las Vegas at 20, assuming you have significantly more money at 40 than at 20. It's like two different Las Vegases. (loc 1680)

We all die a multitude of deaths throughout our lives […] this universal process, of passing from one stage in your life to the next.
[…]
The teenager in you dies, the college student in you dies, the single unattached you dies, the version of you that's a parent of an infant dies, and so on. Once each of these mini-deaths occurs, there's no going back. (loc 1733)

most people just have the sense that there's no time urgency near home; they act as if they will always be able to visit that museum or that nearby beach or that friend some other time. (loc 1794)

Time buckets are a simple tool for discovering what you want your life to look like in broad strokes. Here's what I suggest you do. Draw a timeline of your life from now to the grave, then divide it into intervals of five or ten years. Each of those intervals—say, from age 30 to 40, or from 70 to 75—is a time bucket, which is just a random grouping of years. Then think about what key experiences—activities or events—you definitely want to have during your lifetime. We all have dreams in life, but I have found that it's extremely helpful to actually write them all down in a list. (loc 1805)

As you're making your list, don't worry about money; money at this point is just a distraction from the overall goal, which is to envision what you want your life to be like. Then, once you have your list of items, start to drop each of your hoped-for pursuits into the specific buckets, based on when you'd ideally have each experience. (loc 1817)

For many a man there is so hard of heart
He cannot weep however pains may smart.
Therefore, instead of weeping and of prayer,
Men should give silver to poor friars all bare. (loc 1432)

The remedies of love she knew, perchance,
For of that art she'd learned the old, old dance. (loc 1584)

That, if gold rust, what shall poor iron do?
For if the priest be foul, in whom we trust, What wonder if a layman yield to lust? (loc 1600)

Pray you, now, tell me;
Or where commanded He virginity?
I read as well as you no doubt have read
The apostle when he speaks of maidenhead;
He said, commandment of the Lord he'd none
Men may advise a woman to be one,
But such advice is not commandment, no;
He left the thing to our own judgment so.
For had Lord God commanded maidenhood,
He'd have condemned all marriage as not good;
And certainly, if there were no seed sown,
Virginity where then should it be grown? (loc 1861)

Mic drop

bear no malice to virginity;
Let such be bread of purest white wheat-seed,
And let us wives be called but barley bread;
And yet with barley bread (if Mark you scan)
Jesus Our Lord refreshed full many a man. (loc 1910)

For after wine, of Venus must I think:
For just as surely as cold produces hail,
A liquorish mouth must have a lickerish tail
In women wine's no bar of impotence,
This know all lechers by experience. (loc 2108)

In such condition as God places us
I'll persevere, I'm not fastidious.
In wifehood I will use my instrument
As freely as my Maker has it sent.
If I be niggardly, God give me sorrow!
My husband he shall have it, eve and morrow,
When he's pleased to come forth and pay his debt.
I'll not delay, a husband I will get
Who shall be both my debtor and my thrall
And have his tribulations therewithal
Upon his flesh, the while I am his wife,
I have the power during all my life
Over his own good body, and not he.
For thus the apostle told it unto me;
And bade our husbands that they love us well.
And all this pleases me wherof I tell." (loc 1912)

!! This is pretty raunchy!

I got the best of each one, finally,
By trick, or force, or by some kind of thing,
As by continual growls or murmuring;
Especially in bed had they mischance,
There would I chide and give them no pleasance;
I would no longer in the bed abide
If I but felt his arm across my side,
Till he had paid his ransom unto me;
Then would I let him do his nicety.
And therefore to all men this tale I tell,
Let gain who may, for everything's to sell.
With empty hand men may no falcons lure;
For profit would I all his lust endure,
And make for him a well-feigned appetite;
Yet I in bacon never had delight; (loc 2072)

My ribs yet feel as they were black and blue,
And ever shall, until my dying day.
But in our bed he was so fresh and gay,
And therewithal he could so well impose,
What time he wanted use of my belle chose,
That though he'd beaten me on every bone,
He could re-win my love, and that full soon.
I guess I loved him best of all, for he
Gave of his love most sparingly to me. (loc 2133)

We women have, if I am not to lie,
In this love matter, a quaint fantasy;
Look out a thing we may not lightly have,
And after that we'll cry all day and crave.
Forbid a thing, and that thing covet we;
Press hard upon us, then we turn and flee
Sparingly offer we our goods, when fair;
Great crowds at market make for dearer ware,
And what's too common brings but little price;
All this knows every woman who is wise. (loc 2139)

For trust me, it's impossible, no libel,
That any cleric shall speak well of wives,
Unless it be of saints and holy lives
But naught for other women will they do.
Who painted first the lion, tell me who?
By God, if women had but written stories,
As have these clerks within their oratories,
They would have written of men more wickedness
Than all the race of Adam could redress. (loc 2243)

I'll grant you life if you can tell to me What thing it is that women most desire. (loc 2382)

nowhere ever did it him befall
To find, upon the question stated here,
Two persons who agreed with statement clear.
Some said that women all loved best riches,
Some said fair fame, and some said prettiness;
Some, rich array, some said 'twas lust abed
And often to be widowed and re-wed.
Some said that our poor hearts are aye most eased
When we have been most flattered and thus pleased
And he went near the truth, I will not lie;
A man may win us best with flattery;
And with attentions and with busyness
We're often limed, the greater and the less.
And some say, too, that we do love the best
To be quite free to do our own behest, (loc 2393)

"Woman desire to have the sovereignty As well upon their husband as their love, And to have mastery their man above; (loc 2467)

Gentility is not just the renown
Of ancestors who have some greatness shown,
In which you have no portion of your own.
Your own gentility comes from God alone;
Thence comes our true nobility by grace,
It was not willed us with our rank and place (loc 2544)

poverty's an eye-glass, seems to me, Through which a man his loyal friends may see. (loc 2570)

"Choose, now," said she, "one of these two things, aye,
To have me foul and old until I die,
And be to you a true and humble wife,
And never anger you in all my life;
Or else to have me young and very fair
And take your chance with those who will repair
Unto your house, and all because of me,
Or in some other place, as well may be. (loc 2580)

"My lady and my love, and wife so dear,
I put myself in your wise governing;
Do you choose which may be the more pleasing,
And bring most honour to you, and me also.
I care not which it be of these things two;
For if you like it, that suffices me." (loc 2587)

Only as the life went out of the monster and it slipped dead to the floor did Hera lift the mist of delusion she had visited on him. Looking down, he now saw with appalling clarity that the dragon he had killed was his wife Megara and the two demons were his beloved children. (loc 1165)

Eurystheus, who must surely have been getting used to the disappointment of seeing Heracles return unscathed by now, dedicated the mares to Hera and bred them for his own thoroughbreds. Later Greeks believed that it was from this line that Alexander the Great's famous mount, Bucephalus, was descended. (loc 1556)

"You see?" said Prometheus. "It is your fate to be Heracles the hero, burdened with labors, yet it is also your choice. You choose to submit to it. Such is the paradox of living. We willingly accept that we have no will." (loc 1843)

At school Bellerophon had been taught that in the earliest times of the gods Poseidon created the very first horse as a gift for his sister Demeter. The god had fashioned all kinds of different animals, which he had thrown away before he managed to hit on the perfect creation. The discarded animals—the failures—had been the hippopotamus, the giraffe, the camel, the donkey, and the zebra, each one getting closer to the perfect dimensions, beauty, and balance of the horse. (loc 2549)

One day he mounted Pegasus and rode the winged horse up to Mount Olympus. "The gods will welcome me," he told himself. "I am of their blood. I have always been marked out for greatness." Such hubris was a blasphemy that could not go unpunished. When Zeus saw Bellerophon flying toward the summit, he sent a gadfly to torment Pegasus. The insect's vicious sting maddened the horse, who bucked and reared, throwing Bellerophon. The hero plummeted down through the thin air, smashing his hip on the rocks far below. Pegasus landed on the top of Olympus and Zeus kept him there as his glamorous pack animal, charged with carrying his thunderbolts. Bellerophon dragged out the rest of his days shunned by society for his sacrilege, until he died a crippled, embittered, and lonely old man. (loc 2906)

The island's seer told Ancaeus that, while he would certainly return to Samos safe and sound, he would never taste the vineyard's wine. On his return Ancaeus saw to his delight that the grapes had ripened beautifully and been turned into wine. He summoned the seer before him and raised a cup of the wine to his lips. "So much for your false prophecies," he said, waving the cup in the seer's face. "I should sack you for incompetence." "There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip," said the seer. Just as Ancaeus was about to take a drink, a clamor rose up outside. A wild boar was ravaging the vineyard. Ancaeus put down the cup and ran out to inspect the damage. The boar charged out, tossed him on his tusks, and gored him to death. (loc 4425)

Now Medea prepared to kill her sons. It might seem that what Medea was about to do is the most terrible of her catalog of gruesome crimes; but in Medea, Euripides puts in her mouth a great speech in which she prevaricates over whether or not to do the deed. It stands as one of the great soliloquies in drama. From it Medea emerges sympathetically as a tragic and wholly human dramatic hero. (loc 4464)

At last the Ciconian women could bear the degradation and insult of being ignored no longer and, in a Bacchic frenzy, they tore Orpheus to pieces, pulling off his limbs, and wrenching the head from his shoulders.135 The golden harmonies of Apollo were always an affront to the dark Dionysian dances and dithyrambs. (loc 3150)

His mother Calliope found his golden lyre and carried it heavenward, where it was placed among the stars as the constellation Lyra, which contains Vega, the fifth brightest star in the firmament. (loc 3158)

There was a certain way to settle the question once and for all. He made his way to the oracle at Delphi. He did not know what he expected in reply to the simple, bald question, "Who are my true parents?" but it was not the simple, bald answer he received. Oedipus will kill his father and mate with his mother. (loc 5139)

Oedipus left Delphi in a daze, striking out on a road that took him in the exact opposite direction from Corinth. (loc 5144)

An appointment in Samara

He reached up, pulled the long gold brooch pins from Jocasta's dress, and thrust them into his own eyes. (loc 5470)

Friedrich Nietzsche in his book The Birth of Tragedy, has seen in Oedipus a character who works out on stage the tension in Athenians (and all of us) between the reasoning, mathematically literate citizen and the transgressive blood criminal; between the thinking and the instinctual being; between the superego and the id; between the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses that contend within us. Oedipus is a detective who employs all the fields of inquiry of which the Athenians were so proud—logic, numbers, rhetoric, order, and discovery—only to reveal a truth that is disordered, shameful, transgressive, and bestial. (loc 5513)

When they were far out to sea Theseus looked back and thought he could see the desolate figure of Ariadne standing on the shore in the moonlight. Approaching the island from the other side they could already see the fleet of Dionysus. Theseus mourned the loss of the girl he had fallen in love with, but he knew that the safety of the young people in his charge overrode everything. He had to sacrifice his own happiness. He had to sacrifice her. (loc 6460)

Exiled from his kingdoms of Athens and Troezen for his role, however unwitting, in the deaths of his son and wife, wretched, bitter, desolated, and drained of all passion and purpose, Theseus came to a bathetic and pathetic end. A guest of King Lycomedes of Skyros, Theseus was pushed by his host over a cliff to his death. The cause of the argument between them is lost to us. (loc 6689)

Apollodorus's Bibliotheca (Library) is a major source for all Greek myth, though he is often at variance with Hesiod and Homer. Apollonius Rhodius wrote the Argonautica, from which most of the details of Jason's great voyage in search of the Golden Fleece are derived. (loc 6885)

Myths are not crossword puzzles or allegories with single meanings and answers. Fate, necessity, cause, and blame are endlessly mixed in these stories as they are in our lives. They were no more soluble to the Greeks than they are to us. (loc 6897)

In the past, even in antiquity, mythographers regularly attempted to trace almost all mythic stories back to some actual, historical truth. This is sometimes called Euhemerism or the historical theory of mythology. It is true that archaeology has shown that a Troy really existed, and a Mycenae. Bronze Age and Minoan wall paintings in Crete show bull-leaping and a maze-like structure that suggests the reality of the Labyrinth. Centaurs and Amazons are seen as Greek explanations for the arrival from the east of horses and their archer riders. Another good example of Euhemerism is the idea that the Chimera defeated by Bellerophon was in fact the pirate ship of Cheimarrhus with its lion's figurehead for a prow and serpent for a sternpost. There are plenty of opportunities for that kind of interpretation, as well as for more metaphysical and psychological speculation too. (loc 6900)

Carl Jung described myths as the product of our "collective unconscious." Joseph Campbell put it another way and called them "public dreams." (loc 6906)

Scholars and mythographers are interested in what is known as "double determination," the tendency of poets, playwrights, and other authors to attribute agency and causality to both the inner person and an outer influence, a god or an oracle, for example. If Athena "whispers in your ear," is it just a poetical way of saying that a clever thought has struck you, or did the goddess really speak? (loc 6910)

Might as well call them a god as an impulse or a complex. To personify them is a rather smart way—not of managing them perhaps, but of giving shape, dimensions, and character to the uncontrollable and unfathomable forces that control us. Do "superego" and "id" reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? (loc 6929)

Myth can be a kind of human algebra which makes it easier to manipulate truths about ourselves. Symbols and rituals are not toys and games to be dispensed with on our arrival at adulthood, they are tools we will always need. They complement our scientific impulse; they do not stand in opposition to it. (loc 6933)

MOROS Doom or Destiny. All-powerful, all-knowing controller of the cosmos. Most feared entity in creation, even by immortals. (loc 7065)

the feasibility of the coup derives from a comparatively recent development: the rise of the modern state with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces. The power of the modern state largely depends on this permanent machinery, which, with its archives, files, records, and officials, can follow intimately and, if it so desires, control the activities of lesser organizations and individuals. (loc 335)

if the bureaucrats are linked to the leadership, an illegal seizure of power must take the form of a "Palace Revolution," (loc 344)

The coup is a much more democratic affair. It can be conducted from the "outside" and operates in the area outside the government but within the state—the area formed by the permanent, professional civil service, the armed forces, and the police. The aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state from the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done if the two are linked by political, ethnic, or traditional loyalties. (loc 349)

As a direct consequence of its sheer size, in order to achieve even a minimum of efficiency, the state bureaucracy has to divide its work into clear-cut areas of competence, which are assigned to different departments. Within each department, there must be an accepted chain of command, and standard procedures have to be followed.
A coup operates by taking advantage of this machinelike behavior both during and after the takeover—during the coup because it uses parts of the state apparatus to seize the controlling levers over the rest, and afterward because the value of the levers depends on the degree to which the state really functions as a machine. (loc 375)

some states are so well organized that the machine is sufficiently sophisticated to exercise discretion, according to a given conception of what is proper and what is not, in the orders that it executes. This is the case in the most advanced countries, and, in such circumstances, a coup is very difficult to carry out. In a few states, the bureaucracy is so small that the apparatus is too simple and too intimately linked with the leadership to allow room for a coup, as is still the case perhaps in the ex-British protectorates of southern Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. (loc 378)

Pronunciamiento This is an essentially Spanish and South American version of the military coup d'état, but many recent African coups have also taken this particular form. In its original nineteenth-century Spanish version, […] the pronunciamiento was organized and led by a particular army leader, but it was carried out in the name of the entire officer corps; unlike the putsch, which is carried out by a faction within the army, or the coup, which can also be executed by civilians using some army units, the pronunciamiento leads to a takeover by the army as a whole. (loc 431)

while the political structures of all highly developed countries may seem too resilient to make them suitable targets, if acute enough, even temporary factors can weaken them fatally. Of those temporary factors, the most common are: (a) severe and prolonged economic crisis, with large-scale unemployment or runaway inflation; (b) a long and unsuccessful war or a major defeat, whether military or diplomatic; (c) chronic instability under a multiparty system. (loc 561)

If we can set up efficient defensive roadblocks at the appropriate places, we should be able to deny their entry into the capital city for the short period required—that is, until we have established ourselves as the government and received the allegiance of the bulk of the state bureaucracy and military forces. Thus, by the time the forces of intervention have reached the scene of the action, they will be the isolated band of rebels. (loc 2561)

in a coup the principle of total commitment applies. The active stage takes place in one short period of time, and forces held back today will be useless tomorrow: all our forces must be used in our single decisive engagement. (loc 3002)

the formation of the large teams required by these targets will raise the delicate issue of the coup-within-the-coup danger. During the active phase of the coup, the situation will be confused and extremely unstable; while the other teams will be too small to tempt their leaders into trying to usurp our control, the operational leaders of the A-teams may well succumb to temptation. The man who leads the tanks that have just seized the presidential palace may easily persuade himself that he can also seize power on his own behalf, and if the A-team is sufficiently powerful, he may do just that. (loc 3186)

Until the actual execution of the coup, our aim was to destabilize the situation; afterward, however, all our efforts should be directed at stabilizing, or rather restabilizing, it. We will be doing this at three different levels: (a) among our own forces, where our aim is to prevent our military or police allies from usurping our leadership; (b) within the state bureaucracy, whose allegiance and cooperation we wish to secure; and (c) with the public at large, (loc 3249)

Most countries of the world follow British diplomatic doctrine in granting recognition to regimes on the basis of the effective control of their territories, if only after a decent interval (loc 3453)

Economic development is generally regarded as "a good thing," and almost everybody wants more of it, but for us—the newly established government of X-land—the pursuit of economic development will be undesirable because it militates against our main goal: political stability. (loc 3488)

There are two main instruments with which we can persuade the masses to accept the sacrifice of present consumption for the sake of an increased future income: propaganda and repression or, more efficiently, by a mixture of both. (loc 3513)

The middle way—efficient repression, extensive propaganda, and vigorous economic development to create new elites that accept or even support the regime—has long been followed successfully in China. (loc 3554)

It was precisely for the sake of better coordination in responding to the threat of North Korean commando attacks that the United States pressed the South Koreans to merge their Army Security Command, Navy Security Unit, and Air Force Office of Special Investigations into a single organization. A fully integrated, authentically joint Defense Security Command was ceremoniously inaugurated in October 1977. Two years later, its two-star commanding general, Chun Doo Hwan, used his fully unified command and monopoly of immediate force to seize power when the country's president, Park Chung Hee, was assassinated. (loc 126)
…
While the structures of political life under the Fourth Republic were falling apart, Charles de Gaulle, the grand heroic figure long in simulated retirement, gradually emerged as the only alternative to the chaos that threatened. When the army in Algeria appeared to be on the verge of truly drastic action and yet another government was on the verge of collapse, de Gaulle was recalled. He was able to impose his own terms. On May 29, 1958, when René Coty, the last president of the Fourth Republic, called on him to form a government (which was invested on June 1), de Gaulle was given extraordinary powers to rule by decree for six months and to write a new constitution. (loc 552)

I have been told from time to time that [this book] served as the guide for this or that coup (in the Philippines, its use has been documented in two successive coups). (loc 170)

The existence of regional forces strong enough to control the supposed center may make a coup impossible. If the regional or ethnic bloc is organized along tribal lines, the structures of its leadership will be too firm and intimate for a coup to function from within. There has never been a coup in Lebanon, for example, because it is based on such an arrangement: the Shi'a, Maronite Christian, Sunni Muslim, and Druze blocs are all mutually hostile, but they recognize the fact that no single group can hope to dominate all the others—not even Hezbollah, now the strongest by far. Thus, the Beirut government functions as a common clearinghouse for those policies that are accepted by each ethnic bloc. If one carried out a coup in Beirut, it would immediately lead to the collapse of the system, since each group, backed up by their own armed forces, would seize power in their own region. The coup would therefore only capture parts of Beirut and suburbs; it would probably be unable to retain control beyond that area. (loc 961)

In the early morning of April 23, 1961, elements of the First Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment seized the key points of the city of Algiers in the name of Generals Maurice Challe, André Zeller, Edmond Jouhaud, and Raoul Salan. The four generals, because of their personal prestige and their position in the French hierarchy, quickly asserted their control over the local military command and started to extend their authority over all the armed forces in Algeria. […]
The French armed forces in Algeria were much more powerful than those stationed in France and Germany, and the four generals were hopeful that, once their allegiance was assured, they would find it easy to take effective control of the French government. (loc 2230)

[Haiti]
The Duvalier mix of efficient repression, pervasive propaganda, and no economic development at all paid off: he lasted in power continuously for fourteen years, and was then followed by his son Jean Claude "Baby Doc," who lasted fifteen more years. The Tonton Macoutes operated as a semipublic presidential guard and were able to add to their generous salaries by private exactions from the diminishing business sector. The propaganda machine, which involves ceremonial parades, laudatory films, and the projection of Papa Doc as a voodoo master, was almost as expensive to run as the Tonton Macoutes—but evidently useful. (loc 3541)

My true aim in writing this book was entirely different: it was to explore the meaning of politics in the many backward countries politely described as "emerging." Some, including South Korea, have well and truly emerged since then, but many others have not—Islam in particular seems to be an insurmountable obstacle to democratic governance. (loc 180)

Their abject poverty was not entirely concealed by the exotic scenery; the almost complete absence of an educated class was brutally obvious. Yet, it was only a few right-wing extremists, and the still smaller number of old African hands, who argued that independence was being granted too soon. This small minority was easily dismissed as reactionary and racist. The enlightened knew better: the new states would muster the fresh energies of the peoples liberated from the lethargy of colonial rule; their youth would soon be educated to provide technicians, professionals, and civil servants; given some aid from the West, a great upsurge of economic development was to be expected, and this would soon remedy backwardness and the contrived poverty caused by colonial exploitation. More than that, we were told to look for moral leadership from the new states. (loc 188)

There was one thing that the new states lacked—something they could neither make for themselves nor obtain from abroad: this was a genuine political community. It is difficult to give a formal definition of political community. (loc 208)

The new states came into existence because the colonial authorities handed over their powers to political leaders who had agitated for independence; more specifically, the new leaders were given control over the army, police, tax collectors, and administrators who had worked for the colonial government. (loc 210)

their [elements of state machinery] methods and their operational ideology were those of the imperial power—which were shaped by notions that reflected the values of its political community, including legality. There was no organic nexus between the native cultures and the instruments of state power, and neither could such a link be formed. (loc 213)

The machinery of a colonial state grants strong power to the colonist, but this is power based on the rule of law.

If colonialism were a crime, its greatest offense was its abrupt undoing. It left fragile native cultures, embryonic modern societies, and minority peoples utterly ill equipped to protect themselves when power was abandoned into the hands of political leaders armed with the powerful machine of the modern state. (loc 232)

The incompatibility between Islam and democracy—forever denied by the well meaning, forever reasserted in practice, and sometimes obscured by elections that may in themselves be perfectly free and fair—ensures the prevalence of authoritarian governments in most Muslim countries most of the time; quite a few are dynastic, with a self-perpetuating ruling family that monopolizes political power. That, in turn, ensures the passivity of the population in most places most of the time—Islam means "submission," after all—barring the occasional revolts, soon suppressed in most cases. (loc 266)

Adults show patterns of attachment to their romantic partners similar to the patterns of attachment of children with their parents. (loc 113)

Attachment theory designates three main "attachment styles," or manners in which people perceive and respond to intimacy in romantic relationships, which parallel those found in children: Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant. Basically, secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving; anxious people crave intimacy, are often preoccupied with their relationships, and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back; avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness. (loc 120)

Today, however, we know that attachment styles in adulthood are influenced by a variety of factors, one of which is the way our parents cared for us, but other factors also come into play, including our genes and life experiences. (loc 143)

it's not impossible for someone to change his or her attachment style—on average, one in four people do so over a four-year period (loc 162)

Bowlby proposed that throughout evolution, genetic selection favored people who became attached because it provided a survival advantage. (loc 173)

Don't Lose Sight of These Facts:

• Your attachment needs are legitimate.
• You shouldn't feel bad for depending on the person you are closest to—it is part of your genetic makeup.
• A relationship, from an attachment perspective, should make you feel more self-confident and give you peace of mind. If it doesn't, this is a wake-up call!
• And above all, remain true to your authentic self—playing games will only distance you from your ultimate goal of finding true happiness, be it with your current partner or with someone else.

(loc 2968)

Attachment principles teach us that most people are only as needy as their unmet needs. When their emotional needs are met, and the earlier the better, they usually turn their attention outward. This is sometimes referred to in attachment literature as the "dependency paradox": The more effectively dependent people are on one another, the more independent and daring they become. (loc 281)

The basic premise underlying this point of view is that the ideal relationship is one between two self-sufficient people who unite in a mature, respectful way while maintaining clear boundaries. If you develop a strong dependency on your partner, you are deficient in some way and are advised to work on yourself to become more "differentiated" and develop a "greater sense of self." The worst possible scenario is that you will end up needing your partner, which is equated with "addiction" to him or her, and addiction, we all know, is a dangerous prospect. While the teachings of the codependency movement remain immensely helpful in dealing with family members who suffer from substance abuse (as was the initial intention), they can be misleading and even damaging when applied indiscriminately to all relationships (loc 337)

The book is essentially arguing against the "classical" view of self sufficiency.

when two people form an intimate relationship, they regulate each other's psychological and emotional well-being. Their physical proximity and availability influence the stress response. How can we be expected to maintain a high level of differentiation between ourselves and our partners if our basic biology is influenced by them to such an extent? (loc 359)

the ability to step into the world on our own often stems from the knowledge that there is someone beside us whom we can count on—and this is the "dependency paradox." The logic of this paradox is hard to follow at first. How can we act more independent by being thoroughly dependent on someone else? If we had to describe the basic premise of adult attachment in a single sentence, it would be: If you want to take the road to independence and happiness, first find the right person to depend on and travel down it with them. (loc 377)

having an attachment figure in the room was enough to allow a child to go out into a previously unknown environment and explore with confidence. This presence is known as a secure base. It is the knowledge that you are backed by someone who is supportive and whom you can rely on with 100 percent certainty and turn to in times of need. (loc 397)

I am somewhat uncomfortable being close to others; I find it difficult to trust them completely, difficult to allow myself to depend on them. I am nervous when anyone gets too close, and often, love partners want me to be more intimate than I feel comfortable being. (Measure of the avoidant attachment style) (loc 313)

What's wrong with me? I'm a smart, good-looking guy with a successful career. I have a lot to offer. I've dated some terrific women, but inevitably, after a few weeks I lose interest and start to feel trapped. It shouldn't be this hard to find someone I'm compatible with. • I've (loc 63)

Avoidant: It is very important for you to maintain your independence and self-sufficiency and you often prefer autonomy to intimate relationships. Even though you do want to be close to others, you feel uncomfortable with too much closeness and tend to keep your partner at arm's length. You don't spend much time worrying about your romantic relationships or about being rejected. You tend not to open up to your partners and they often complain that you are emotionally distant. In relationships, you are often on high alert for any signs of control or impingement on your territory by your partner. (loc 497)

The experiments show that although you may be avoidant, your attachment "machinery" is still in place—making you just as vulnerable to threats of separation. Only when your mental energy is needed elsewhere and you are caught off guard, however, do these emotions and feelings emerge. (loc 1207)

One of the consequences of devaluing your romantic relationship is that you often wake up long after the relationship has gone stale, having forgotten all those negative things that annoyed you about your partner, wondering what went wrong and reminiscing longingly about your long-lost love. We call it the phantom-ex phenomenon. (loc 1336)

Partner is amazing, but as you start to get closer, you become overwhelmed with the feeling that s/he isn't actually so hot after all? This can even happen after you've gone out with someone for a considerable amount of time or very intensively, all the while believing that s/he is the one, when all of a sudden you experience a chilling effect. You start to notice she has a weird way of eating, or that his nose blowing infuriates you. You end up discovering that after the initial exhilaration, you feel suffocated and need to take a step back. What you don't realize is that this surge of negativity could in fact be a deactivating strategy, unconsciously triggered to turn off your attachment needs. (loc 1351)

Devaluing your partner when things become too close is very typical of people with an avoidant attachment style and is used as a way to create emotional distance. (loc 727)

Someone with an anxious attachment style craves intimacy but is also very sensitive to even the smallest of perceived threats to this closeness. Sometimes they'll interpret your unconscious actions as a threat to the relationship. When this happens, they become flooded with apprehension, but they lack the skills to communicate their distress to you effectively. Instead, they resort to a lot of acting out and drama. (loc 598)

people with an anxious attachment style are indeed more vigilant to changes in others' emotional expression and can have a higher degree of accuracy and sensitivity to other people's cues. However, this finding comes with a caveat. The study showed that people with an anxious attachment style tend to jump to conclusions very quickly, and when they do, they tend to misinterpret people's emotional state. (loc 794)

they are often consumed with thoughts that have a single purpose: to reestablish closeness with their partner. These thoughts are called activating strategies. (loc 802)

Next time you date someone and find yourself feeling anxious, insecure, and obsessive—only to feel elated every once in a while—tell yourself this is most likely an activated attachment system and not love! (loc 950)

there was no observed difference between secure couples and "mixed" couples— those with only one secure partner. (loc 1425)

negative threatening themes didn't get through to them as easily. However, unlike avoidants, who didn't react to these words initially but did react to them when they were distracted by another task, secures continued to overlook them even in the distraction condition. Unlike people with an avoidant attachment style, secures aren't concerned with threatening relationship thoughts even when they are caught off guard. In other words, they don't have to make an effort to repress these ideas; they simply aren't worried about these issues—either consciously or subconsciously! (loc 1461)

The good news is that people with a secure attachment style have healthy instincts and usually catch on very early that someone is not cut out to be their partner. The bad news is that when secure people do, on occasion, enter into a negative relationship, they might not know when to call it quits—especially if it's a long-term, committed relationship in which they feel responsible for their partner's happiness. (loc 1615)

When people can recall a past relationship with a secure person or be inspired by a secure role model in their lives, they are often successful at adopting secure ways. (loc 1751)

We can tap into our attitudes toward our pets as a secure resource within us—we don't assume our pets are doing things purposely to hurt us, we don't hold grudges even when they eat something they shouldn't or make a mess, we still greet them warmly when we come home (even after a rough day at the office), and we stick by them no matter what. Go (loc 1772)

If you are avoidant—the surefire sign that you need to use effective communication is when you feel an irrepressible need to bolt. Use effective communication to explain to your partner that you need some space and that you'd like to find a way of doing so that is acceptable to him or her. Suggest a few alternatives, making sure that the other person's needs are taken care of. (loc 2509)

[Relationship Inventory technique]
Start by listing, in the left-hand column (1), the names of all your romantic partners, past and present. These can include people you've dated briefly. We suggest working vertically, one column at a time. Completing the inventory vertically encourages you to focus less on each particular scenario and to achieve an integrated picture of your working model across relationships. The more information you gather, the better. In column 2, write what you remember about the relationship: what it was like and what things stand out most when you try to recall your time together. Once you write down your general recollections of the relationship, column 3 allows you to take a closer look and identify specific scenarios that contribute to activation/deactivation of your attachment system. Column 4 asks how you responded to these situations: What did you do? What were you thinking? How did you feel? The lists below the inventory are provided to help you recall these reactions. Column 5 is a crucial next step. You will need to reassess these experiences from an attachment perspective to gain insight into the issues that affected your relationships. What attachment issues underlie your reactions: Protest behavior? Deactivation? Refer to the lists as a guide. In column 6, you're asked to consider ways in which your reaction—now translated into attachment principles—hurts you and gets in the way of your happiness. Finally, column 7 prompts you to consider new, secure ways of handling these situations using a security-enhancing role model in your life and the secure principles we outline in this book (and in the box on page 174). (loc 1794)

her heart jumped inside her ribs when she saw her man lying on his back in the mud, dead to this life but still resisting death's final blow for one last minute so that she would have time to come to him. He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: "Only God knows how much I loved you." (loc 743)

a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, and in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. On the contrary: life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary. (loc 239)

He was aware that he did not love her. He had married her because he liked her haughtiness, her seriousness, her strength, and also because of some vanity on his part, but as she kissed him for the first time he was sure there would be no obstacle to their inventing true love. They did not speak of it that first night, when they spoke of everything until dawn, nor would they ever speak of it. But in the long run, neither of them had made a mistake. (loc 2729)

she was something she never dared admit even to herself: a deluxe servant. In society she came to be the woman most loved, most catered to, and by the same token most feared, but in nothing was she more demanding or less forgiving than in the management of her house. She always felt as if her life had been lent to her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service. (loc 3788)

She did not blame him: she blamed life. But he was an implacable protagonist in that life. (loc 3799)

he was able in various truthful ways to account for the presence of his carriage outside the house of Miss Lynch, but he could not allow it to stay there too long, least of all for the amount of time he would have desired, which was the rest of his life. (loc 4204)

Urbino's affair

The world became a hell for him. For once the initial madness was sated, they both became aware of the risks involved, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino never had the resolve to face a scandal. In the deliriums of passion he promised everything, but when it was over, everything was left for later. On the other hand, as his desire to be with her grew, so did his fear of losing her, so that their meetings became more and more hurried and problematic. He thought about nothing else. He waited for the afternoons with unbearable longing, he forgot his other commitments, he forgot everything but her, but as his carriage approached the Mala Crianza salt marsh he prayed to God that an unforeseen obstacle would force it to drive past. (loc 4206)

The last thing Miss Lynch received from him was an emerald tiara in a little box wrapped in paper from the pharmacy, so that the coachman himself thought it was an emergency prescription and handed it to her with no comment, no message, nothing in writing. Dr. Urbino never saw her again, not even by accident, and God alone knows how much grief his heroic resolve cost him or how many bitter tears he had to shed behind the locked lavatory door in order to survive this private catastrophe. (loc 4263)

"It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not." (loc 5668)

it was not her memory alone that accompanied him to the party Leona Cassiani gave for him that night. The memory of them all was with him: those who slept in the cemeteries, thinking of him through the roses he planted over them, as well as those who still laid their heads on the pillow where their husbands slept, their horns golden in the moonlight. Deprived of one, he wanted to be with them all at the same time, which is what he always wanted whenever he was fearful. For even during his most difficult times and at his worst moments, he had maintained some link, no matter how weak, with his countless lovers of so many years: he always kept track of their lives. (loc 4623)

Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse." He wept copious tears at the grief of parting. But as soon as the ship had disappeared over the horizon, the memory of Fermina Daza once again occupied all his space. (loc 4650)

His natural gallantry and languid manner were immediately charming, but they were also considered suspect virtues in a confirmed bachelor. He had spent a great deal of money, ingenuity, and willpower to disguise the seventy-six years he had completed in March, and he was convinced in the solitude of his soul that he had loved in silence for a much longer time than anyone else in this world ever had. (loc 843)

Florentino Ariza developed methods that seemed incredible in someone like him, taciturn and thin and dressed like an old man from another time. He had two advantages working in his favor, however. One was an unerring eye that promptly spotted the woman, even in a crowd, who was waiting for him, though even then he courted her with caution, for he felt that nothing was more embarrassing or more demeaning than a refusal. The other was that women promptly identified him as a solitary man in need of love, a street beggar as humble as a whipped dog, who made them yield without conditions, without asking him for anything, without hoping for anything from him except the tranquillity of knowing they had done him a favor. (loc 2601)

He would say: "You treat me as if I were just anybody." She would roar with the laughter of a free female and say: "Not at all: as if you were nobody." (loc 3032)

In the plenitude of their relationship, Florentino Ariza had asked himself which of the two was love: the turbulent bed or the peaceful Sunday afternoons, and Sara Noriega calmed him with the simple argument that love was everything they did naked. (loc 3396)

On the Pentecost Sunday when Juvenal Urbino died, he had only one left, only one, who had just turned fourteen and had everything that no one else until then had had to make him mad with love. Her name was América Vicuña. She had arrived two years before from the fishing village of Puerto Padre, entrusted by her family to Florentino Ariza as her guardian and recognized blood relative. (loc 4673)

It is hard to know how to interpret the América Vicuña romance – from what I gather, in the novel's setting of the early 20th century, many regions had a legal marriage age of as young as 14. But I am assuming Florentino's relationship with América would have been as taboo as it is today.

"Fermina," he said, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." (loc 871)

FLORENTINO ARIZA, on the other hand, had not stopped thinking of her for a single moment since Fermina Daza had rejected him out of hand after a long and troubled love affair fifty-one years, nine months, and four days ago. (loc 892)

Years later, when he tried to remember what the maiden idealized by the alchemy of poetry really was like, he could not distinguish her from the heartrending twilights of those times. (loc 1095)

Memory has no reliability when coloured by emotion

Then Florentino Ariza knew that some night, sometime in the future, in a joyous bed with Fermina Daza, he was going to tell her that he had not revealed the secret of his love, not even to the one person who had earned the right to know it. No: he would never reveal it, not even to Leona Cassiani, not because he did not want to open the chest where he had kept it so carefully hidden for half his life, but because he realized only then that he had lost the key. (loc 3284)

he knew that any conventional slip, the slightest nostalgic indiscretion, could revive the unpleasant taste of the past in her heart, and although he foresaw her returning a hundred letters to him before she dared open the first, he preferred that it not happen even once. And so he planned everything down to the last detail, as if it were the final battle: new intrigues, new hopes in a woman who had already lived a full and complete life. It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone's. It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself. (loc 5030)

By the time she had emptied the teapot and he the coffeepot, they had both attempted and then broken off several topics of conversation, not so much because they were really interested in them but in order to avoid others that neither dared to broach. They were both intimidated, they could not understand what they were doing so far from their youth on a terrace with checkerboard tiles in a house that belonged to no one and that was still redolent of cemetery flowers. (loc 5249)

She began to speak of her dead husband in the present tense, as if he were alive, and Florentino Ariza knew then that for her, too, the time had come to ask herself with dignity, with majesty, with an irrepressible desire to live, what she should do with the love that had been left behind without a master. (loc 5663)

they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death. (loc 5954)

That was why she was so taken aback by his dramatic reiteration of a love that for her had never existed, at an age when Florentino Ariza and she could expect nothing more from life. (loc 4865)

they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. She thought that he would at last be convinced of the unreality of his dream, and that this would redeem his insolence. (loc 5253)

"Love is the only thing that interests me," he said. "The trouble," his uncle said to him, "is that without river navigation there is no love." (loc 2848)

She reminded him that the weak would never enter the kingdom of love, which is a harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give themselves only to men of resolute spirit, who provide the security they need in order to face life. Florentino Ariza learned the lesson, perhaps too well. Tránsito Ariza could not hide a feeling of pride, more carnal than maternal, when she saw him leave the notions shop in his black suit and stiff felt hat, his lyrical bow tie and celluloid collar, and she asked him as a joke if he was going to a funeral. He answered, his ears flaming: "It's almost the same thing." (loc 1109)

The over-protective mother

Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women […] always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themselves. (loc 4932)

At Dr. Juvenal Urbino's time of life, that night at the film, men blossomed in a kind of autumnal youth, they seemed more dignified with their first gray hairs, they became witty and seductive, above all in the eyes of young women, while their withered wives had to clutch at their arms so as not to trip over their own shadows. A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men on charity, (loc 4406)

The memory of the past did not redeem the future, as he insisted on believing. On the contrary, it strengthened the conviction that Fermina Daza had always had, that the feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love. (loc 5458)

he looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love, and he was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits. (loc 6004)

This book is an analysis of economic fallacies that are at last so prevalent that they have almost become a new orthodoxy. The one thing that has prevented this has been their own self-contradictions, which have scattered those who accept the same premises into a hundred different "schools," for the simple reason that it is impossible in matters touching practical life to be consistently wrong. (loc 41)

the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences. (loc 102)

There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: "In the long run we are all dead." And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom. But the tragedy is that, on the contrary, we are already suffering the long-run consequences of the policies of the remote or recent past. Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore. (loc 114)

the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. (loc 122)

It is often complained that demagogues can be more plausible in putting forward economic nonsense from the platform than the honest men who try to show what is wrong with it. But the basic reason for this ought not to be mysterious. The reason is that the demagogues and bad economists are presenting half-truths. They are speaking only of the immediate effect of a proposed policy or its effect upon a single group. As far as they go they may often be right. (loc 141)

When they say that the way to economic salvation is to increase credit, it is just as if they said that the way to economic salvation is to increase debt: these are different names for the same thing seen from opposite sides. (loc 2560)

This is a mathematical identity and is unequivocally true.

the student whose aim is to attain as much truth as possible […] will not be forever seeking a revolution, a "fresh start," in economic thought. His mind will, of course, be as receptive to new ideas as to old ones; but he will be content to put aside merely restless or exhibitionistic straining for novelty and originality. As Morris R. Cohen has remarked: "The notion that we can dismiss the views of all previous thinkers surely leaves no basis for the hope that our own work will prove of any value to others." (loc 55)

The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine—the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. […]
The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible. (loc 98)

The deductive side of economics is no less important than the factual. One can say of it what Santayana says of logic (and what could be equally well said of mathematics), that it "traces the radiation of truth," so that "when one term of a logical system is known to describe a fact, the whole system attaching to that term becomes, as it were, incandescent." (loc 2556)

when we study the effects of various proposals, not merely on special groups in the short run, but on all groups in the long run, the conclusions we arrive at usually correspond with those of unsophisticated common sense. (loc 2573)

This is a relatively insightful point.

[Does breaking a window create productivity]
The crowd is at least right in its first conclusion. This little act of vandalism will in the first instance mean more business for some glazier. The glazier will be no more unhappy to learn of the incident than an undertaker to learn of a death. But the shopkeeper will be out $250 that he was planning to spend for a new suit. Because he has had to replace a window, he will have to go without the suit (or some equivalent need or luxury). (loc 167)

The glazier's gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor's loss of business. No new "employment" has been added. (loc 173)

the broken-window fallacy, under a hundred disguises, is the most persistent in the history of economics. (loc 180)

They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see "miracles of production" which it requires a war to achieve. (loc 185)

confused need with demand. The more war destroys, the more it impoverishes, the greater is the postwar need. Indubitably. But need is not demand. Effective economic demand requires not merely need but corresponding purchasing power. The needs of India today are incomparably greater than the needs of America. But its purchasing power, and therefore the "new business" that it can stimulate, are incomparably smaller. (loc 191)

Wherever business was increased in one direction, it was (except insofar as productive energies were stimulated by a sense of want and urgency) correspondingly reduced in another. The war, in short, changed the postwar direction of effort; it changed the balance of industries; it changed the structure of industry. (loc 209)

There may be, it is true, offsetting factors. Technological discoveries and advances during a war may, for example, increase individual or national productivity at this point or that, and there may eventually be a net increase in overall productivity. (loc 257)

such complications should not divert us from recognizing the basic truth that the wanton destruction of anything of real value is always a net loss, a misfortune, or a disaster, (loc 259)

all government expenditures must eventually be paid out of the proceeds of taxation; that inflation itself is merely a form, and a particularly vicious form, of taxation. (loc 275)

A bridge is built. If it is built to meet an insistent public demand, if it solves a traffic problem or a transportation problem otherwise insoluble, if, in short, it is even more necessary to the taxpayers collectively than the things for which they would have individually spent their money if it had not been taxed away from them, there can be no objection. But a bridge built primarily "to provide employment" is a different kind of bridge. (loc 284)

It is true that a particular group of bridgeworkers may receive more employment than otherwise. But the bridge has to be paid for out of taxes. For every dollar that is spent on the bridge a dollar will be taken away from taxpayers. If the bridge costs $10 million the taxpayers will lose $10 million. They will have that much taken away from them which they would otherwise have spent on the things they needed most. (loc 295)

There is a strange idea abroad, held by all monetary cranks, that credit is something a banker gives to a man. Credit, on the contrary, is something a man already has. He has it, perhaps, because he already has marketable assets of a greater cash value than the loan for which he is asking. Or he has it because his character and past record have earned it. He brings it into the bank with him. That is why the banker makes him the loan. (loc 434)

The proposal is frequently made that the government ought to assume the risks that are "too great for private industry." This means that bureaucrats should be permitted to take risks with the taxpayers' money that no one is willing to take with his own. (loc 453)

Correct. Maybe this is a feature not a bug! Maybe there are bets that individual utility functions will not allow us to make that the government should make!

When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business. Under certain emergency circumstances there may be a plausible argument for this, the merits of which we need not examine here. But in the long run it does not sound like a paying proposition from the standpoint of the country as a whole. (loc 498)

This is a bit disingenuous. All successful businesses are unsuccessful to begin with.

What possible point can there be, he is likely to ask, in discussing refinements and advances in economic theory, when popular thought and the actual policies of governments, certainly in everything connected with international relations, have not yet caught up with Adam Smith? For present-day tariff and trade policies are not only as bad as those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but incomparably worse. (loc 842)

the added amount which consumers pay for a tariff-protected article leaves them just that much less with which to buy all other articles. There is here no net gain to industry as a whole. But as a result of the artificial barrier erected against foreign goods, American labor, capital and land are deflected from what they can do more efficiently to what they do less efficiently. Therefore, as a result of the tariff wall, the average productivity of American labor and capital is reduced. (loc 919)

The effect of a tariff, therefore, is to change the structure of American production. It changes the number of occupations, the kind of occupations, and the relative size of one industry as compared with another. It makes the industries in which we are comparatively inefficient larger, and the industries in which we are comparatively efficient smaller. (loc 958)

Collectively considered, the real reason a country needs exports is to pay for its imports. (loc 1066)

Let us now look at some of the results of government attempts to hold the prices of commodities below their natural market levels. (loc 1455)

production of that commodity is discouraged. Profit margins are reduced or wiped out. The marginal producers are driven out of business. Even the most efficient producers may be called upon to turn out their product at a loss. This happened in World War II when slaughter houses were required by the Office of Price Administration to slaughter and process meat for less than the cost to them of cattle on the hoof and the labor of slaughter and processing. (loc 1486)

Each one of us, in brief, has a multiple economic personality. Each one of us is producer, taxpayer, consumer. The policies he advocates depend upon the particular aspect under which he thinks of himself at the moment. (loc 1582)

Rent control is initially imposed on the argument that the supply of housing is not "elastic"—i.e., that a housing shortage cannot be immediately made up, no matter how high rents are allowed to rise. Therefore, it is contended, the government, by forbidding increases in rents, protects tenants from extortion and exploitation without doing any real harm to landlords and without discouraging new construction. (loc 1601)

If landlords are allowed to raise rents to reflect a monetary inflation and the true conditions of supply and demand, individual tenants will economize by taking less space. This will allow others to share the accommodations that are in short supply. The same amount of housing will shelter more people, until the shortage is relieved. (loc 1605)

Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself. Hitler provided full employment with a huge armament program. World War II provided full employment for every nation involved. The slave labor in Germany had full employment. Prisons and chain gangs have full employment. Coercion can always provide full employment. (loc 819)

Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure.

It is unfortunate for clarity of economic thinking that the price of labor's services should have received an entirely different name from other prices. (loc 1693)

The only exception to this occurs when a group of workers is receiving a wage actually below its market worth. (loc 1707)

A peaceful strike is possible. To the extent that it remains peaceful, it is a legitimate labor weapon, even though it is one that should be used rarely and as a last resort. (loc 1812)

I was somewhat surprised by his support of unions, but it makes sense.

If his workers as a body withhold their labor, they may bring a stubborn employer, who has been underpaying them, to his senses. (loc 1813)

the moment they use mass picketing to prevent any of the old workers from continuing at their jobs, or to prevent the employer from hiring new permanent workers to take their places—their case becomes suspect. For the pickets are really being used, not primarily against the employer, but against other workers. These other workers are willing to take the jobs that the old employees have vacated, and at the wages that the old employees now reject. (loc 1815)

statistics and history are useless in economics unless accompanied by a basic deductive understanding of the facts—which means in this case an understanding of why the past consequences of the introduction of machinery and other labor-saving devices had to occur. Otherwise the technophobes will assert (as they do in fact assert when you point out to them that the prophecies of their predecessors turned out to be absurd): "That may have been all very well in the past, but today conditions are fundamentally different; and now we simply cannot afford to develop any more labor-saving machines." (loc 575)

the manufacturer, as a result of his economies, has profits that he did not have before. Every dollar of the amount he has saved in direct wages to former coat makers, he now has to pay out in indirect wages to the makers of the new machine, or to the workers in another capital-using industry, or to the makers of a new house or car for himself, or for jewelry and furs for his wife. In any case (unless he is a pointless hoarder) he gives indirectly as many jobs as he ceased to give directly. (loc 609)

profits are the form of income toward which there is most hostility. (loc 2070)

governmental policy almost everywhere today tends to assume that production will go on automatically, no matter what is done to discourage it. (loc 2094)

The price charged by all firms for the same commodity or service must be the same; those who try to charge a higher price do not find buyers. Therefore the largest profits go to the firms that have achieved the lowest costs of production. These expand at the expense of the inefficient firms with higher costs. It is thus that the consumer and the public are served. (loc 2115)

the oldest and most stubborn error on which the appeal of inflation rests is that of confusing "money" with wealth. "That wealth consists in money, or in gold and silver," wrote Adam Smith more than two centuries ago, "is a popular notion which naturally arises from the double function of money, as the instrument of commerce, and as the measure of value…. (loc 2138)

The first groups to receive the additional money will benefit the most. The money incomes of group A, for example, will have increased before prices have increased, so that they will be able to buy almost a proportionate increase in goods. (loc 2196)

QE and asset inflation benefitted asset holders first!

On the assumption that inflation affected everyone and everything evenly (which, we have seen, is never true), it would be tantamount to a flat sales tax of the same percentage on all commodities, with the rate as high on bread and milk as on diamonds and furs. Or it might be thought of as equivalent to a flat tax of the same percentage, without exemptions, on everyone's income. (loc 2300)

today the ancient virtue of thrift, as well as its defense by the classical economists, is once more under attack, for allegedly new reasons, while the opposite doctrine of spending is in fashion. (loc 2333)

"Saving" in short, in the modern world, is only another form of spending [because the money in a bank is lent out]. The usual difference is that the money is turned over to someone else to spend on means to increase production. (loc 2358)

Mere hoarding of hand-to-hand money, if it takes place irrationally, causelessly, and on a large scale, is in most economic situations harmful. But this sort of hoarding is extremely rare. (loc 2371)

This hoarding of cash may seem like a cause of a subsequent slowdown in business activity. The real cause, however, is the uncertainty brought about by the government policies. The larger cash balances of firms and individuals are merely one link in the chain of consequences from that uncertainty. To blame "excessive saving" for the business decline would be like blaming a fall in the price of apples not on a bumper crop but on the people who refuse to pay more for apples. (loc 2387)

This is very weak. He is conceding that the hoarding of cash is directly causal (if not at the root of the causal chain)… so discouraging hoarding is a valid (and possibly most proximal) solution.

If interest rates are artificially kept too low in relation to risks, there will be a reduction in both saving and lending. (loc 2454)

while new injections of currency or bank credit can at first, and temporarily, bring about lower interest rates, persistence in this device must eventually raise interest rates. It does so because new injections of money tend to lower the purchasing power of money. Lenders then come to realize that the money they lend today will buy less a year from now, say, when they get it back. Therefore to the normal interest rate they add a premium to compensate them for this expected loss in their money's purchasing power. This premium can be high, depending on the extent of the expected inflation. Thus the annual interest rate on British treasury bills rose to 14 percent in 1976; Italian government bonds yielded 16 percent in 1977; and the discount rate of the central bank of Chile soared to 75 percent in 1974. (loc 2473)

I argue that the immense political upheaval of the French Revolution, and the emergence of newly intense forms of European warfare, reinforced each other in a strikingly powerful and original manner that made Napoleon possible. He, in turn, tried—and ultimately failed—to forge a regime that based its legitimacy on the revolutionary principles of popular sovereignty and civic equality, but also on personal charisma and military glory. (loc 73)

He is, after all, the man who, born in obscurity, acquired the greatest military reputation of any European military commander in centuries while still in his twenties. At thirty he ruled France, and at forty he dominated Europe as no individual had since Charlemagne—perhaps, indeed, since the Caesars. (loc 97)

Napoleon orders his own men to lower their weapons. An aide protests, but he insists. He steps forward, out in front of his own troops, to within twenty feet of the royalist regiment. "Soldiers of the Fifth!" he cries out to them. "I am your emperor! Acknowledge me!" He walks a few more steps, and in a dramatic gesture, opens his coat, exposing his chest as a target. "If there is any soldier among you who wants to kill his emperor," he continues, his voice firm, "here I am!" For a moment, there is silence. Then, somewhere in the royalist lines, a voice can be heard ordering men to open fire. But no one does. The line stands, fearful, indecisive. And then, a different cry is heard. "Vive l'Empereur!" "Long Live the Emperor!" (loc 109)

The "encounter at Laffrey" stands as one of the most dramatic moments in one of the most dramatic lives anyone has ever lived. It was also, to an extent that historians have not always recognized, stage-managed. One of Napoleon's officers had met with a royalist officer before the confrontation, and the royalist had confessed that his men would probably refuse to fire on their former sovereign. Napoleon's envoy then suggested, with a crowd of royalist soldiers listening in, that Napoleon could make a personal appeal. While the emperor could not know for sure that the royalists would hold their fire, when he opened his coat on the afternoon of March 7, he did so with reasonable confidence that his gesture would have the intended effect. (loc 127)

From his first campaigns in the mid-1790s, he knew the political importance of actively crafting his image in all available media: print, painting, sculpture, oratory, even architecture. […]
He was a product of the first great modern age of celebrity, and he understood, viscerally, how to manage celebrity in the service of power. (loc 137)

it is all too easy to see him as a pure force—and freak—of nature who imposed himself on the world through sheer boldness and brilliance. Bold and brilliant he was, but also shrewd. He understood how radically Europe had changed in the decades during which he had come of age, and he knew better than anyone else how to seize the new opportunities that had arisen. (loc 140)

the churches taught submission: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's" (Matthew 22); "For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power … shall receive to themselves damnation" (Romans 13). (loc 170)

The events of this first stage of the French Revolution damaged the country in some ways. But they also swept aside social privilege and inefficient state institutions and engendered new ideas and practices of national sovereignty and civic equality. With the coming of elections and a raucous free press, political figures learned to appeal directly to ordinary citizens to gain power. (loc 226)

it also radically changed the nature of war. At the time of Napoleon's birth, European warfare had, by the horrific standards of previous centuries, turned remarkably limited. While kings and princes fought each other for territory and commercial advantage, they did not generally seek to overthrow each other's regimes. (loc 233)

The French strategist Count Guibert predicted that if a free and virtuous nation were to arise in the midst of Europe, "its style of war will not be the one practiced by states today. … Terrible in its wrath, it will bring fire and steel to its enemy's hearth." (loc 249)

revolutionary generals now sought out major battles to make best use of their superior numbers, encouraged the formation of new revolutionary governments in occupied territories, and ransacked those territories to keep their own forces supplied. (loc 280)

Napoleon was a product of total war, would become its master, and would end up its victim. (loc 286)

the Revolution made him possible, by making possible the new forms of political authority and the new forms of war. […]
Napoleon built on the military successes enabled by the new forms of warfare so as to craft his political persona as a hero and savior; to inspire (at least for a time) very genuine popular support and thereby to hold power. (loc 294)

Like countless lonely children, before and after, Napoleon found comfort and companionship in books. We do not know what he read at this earliest stage, but by adolescence the habit of intensive reading had already become deeply engrained. "I lived like a bear … always alone in my small room with my books … my only friends!" (loc 335)

He had a stroke of luck when the commander of the artillery was wounded and Christophe Salicetti, a Corsican member of the National Convention and patron of the Buonapartes, named him to the vacant position. Napoleon showed political ruthlessness immediately, denouncing superior officers to the dictatorial Committee of Public Safety in order to get his own battle plans approved. He also demonstrated his tremendous energy and military acumen by effectively reorganizing the artillery, identifying a crucial weak point in Toulon's defenses and leading the attack against it personally. He demonstrated genuine physical courage as well, receiving a bayonet wound to the thigh and having a horse shot out from under him. Toulon fell to the Republic, and another powerful deputy wrote to Paris praising Napoleon as an officer of "transcendent merit." Still just twenty-four years old, he was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. (loc 414)

(The average age of new French generals in the 1790s was just thirty-three.) (loc 427)

with Rose, things were much more serious, and after six months he prevailed on the older woman to marry him, much to the displeasure of his own family. She thereafter went by the name he bestowed on her: Joséphine. Her ardor never matched his, and she took lovers when he left on campaign, causing him considerable anguish. (loc 456)

At the start of this period, just twenty-six years old, he was already an important French general, but still just one of several. Three and a half years later, he was, without exaggeration, the new Caesar. (loc 481)

Many are the historical opportunities that have been lost for lack of talent or vision, and many are the individuals who came into history at the wrong time and place to make the mark they could have. (loc 488)

The genuinely extraordinary mental abilities that he had now had the chance to display to the fullest. He had a nearly photographic memory and the ability to visualize the positions of thousands of men in scores of separate units, along with salient details about munitions and supplies. He could see in a moment how to maneuver everything for maximum effect. (loc 493)

Napoleon understood, far better than his rivals, and far better than his predecessors on the merry-go-round of French revolutionary politics, that in a newly democratic age, political success depended on forging a bond with ordinary people. (loc 507)

he did not hesitate to give his men a share of the spoils. Much later, in exile, he remembered telling them: "I will lead you into the most fertile plains on earth. Rich provinces, wealthy towns, all will be yours for the taking. There you will find honor, and glory, and riches." The soldiers in fact shared in the vast sums that France extracted from Italy during the campaign: (loc 554)

"A few million dollars are lost in the sands of time" – generosity goes a long way.

At various points in the eighteenth century, France had cast a covetous glance toward Egypt as a possible site of colonization. Ruled by the warrior caste of the Mamelukes under the nominal aegis of the Turks' Ottoman Empire, the country possessed a strategic position on both the Mediterranean and Red Seas. (In theory, it could even serve as a base for attacking Britain's colonies in India.) For Napoleon, the idea of conquering it served a triple purpose. It gave him the perfect excuse to withdraw from a political scene that was not yet ready for him. It offered him the chance to add even more laurels to his reputation—and what better destination, for a man so frequently compared to Alexander the Great and Caesar, than a country both had conquered in their days? (loc 647)

After brutally repressing it, with a death toll in the thousands, Napoleon displayed the same ruthlessness as in Italy, coldly ordering his men to behead three hundred more rebels and throw their corpses into the Nile. Meanwhile, the invasion helped provoke the formation of a new, broad-based coalition against France, (loc 710)

In order to intimidate the population and impress the Turkish commanders, he gave his troops free rein to sack and pillage for days after Jaffa had surrendered. He also ordered three thousand captured enemy soldiers taken down to the beach and shot, claiming he did not have the manpower to hold them prisoner. This last decision spurred an anguished discussion among his generals, which Napoleon supposedly ended by screaming at his closest aide, Berthier, that if he felt squeamish, he could go off and become a monk. (loc 717)

The French today do not much admire Napoleon Bonaparte, but to the extent they do, it is for his domestic achievements during the period 1799–1804, known as the Consulate. It was a period of authoritarian rule but also of energetic state-building, during which Napoleon established institutions and principles by which the French still govern themselves today. (loc 776)

He mistrusted the very notion of political liberty, which in his view produced the kind of wild, dangerous political lurches that threatened the country's very survival. He considered himself a man of the Revolution, but what he admired in the Revolution was its hostility to undeserved social privilege, to intolerance and superstition, and to sloth and inefficiency disguised as tradition. (loc 794)

Further from the seat of power but still important were a group of revolutionary intellectuals called the "Ideologues"—they in fact invented the word, along with "ideology," which they defined as the "science of ideas." They believed that a proper understanding of how the mind worked would allow them to instill rational beliefs and cooperative behavior in the general population, thereby eliminating political strife, and perhaps even the need for political competition. (loc 806)

Rather than wait for subordinate generals to turn the situation around, Napoleon took a colossal gamble. In the spring, he put together an army of thirty-five thousand men from reserve forces in France and led them in person over one of the highest and most treacherous passes in the Alps, coming out into the north Italian plain, cutting off the Austrian army from its base and supplies. (loc 820)

Soon after the coup of the Eighteenth Brumaire, he shouldered aside Emmanuel Sieyès, and the new constitution stipulated that only one Consul, chosen for a term of ten years, would exercise real power. This constitution did provide for a parliament but restricted its powers by splitting it into the Tribunate, which had the right to discuss legislation but not vote, and the Legislative Assembly, which could vote but not discuss. (loc 873)

Over mild and hesitant opposition from his tame Senate, he insisted on yet another new constitution (the fifth in eleven years), which transformed him into Consul for Life and gave him the ability to choose his successor, while leaving most other aspects of the government as they were. Another plebiscite took place and delivered a large majority in favor, which the Interior Ministry again rigged to look even more impressive. It was a clear move toward monarchy, and in keeping with the shift, Napoleon's face began to appear on French coins. Yet Napoleon continued to identify himself with the French Revolution, and the right continued to plot against him. (loc 883)

Napoleon's France had no gulag and no concentration camps. Throughout Napoleon's fifteen years in power, there were few political executions, and the rate of political imprisonment remained tiny by modern standards. (loc 902)

keeping Portugal under control required the cooperation of the large country lying between it and France, namely Spain. In theory, Spain had been France's ally since 1796, (loc 1288)

the attempt to place a Bonaparte on the Spanish throne triggered not just insurrections but a massive rebellion. In Madrid itself, Murat's men fought bloody street battles in the first days of May, and massacred hundreds of prisoners before restoring order. (The painter Francisco Goya immortalized the scenes in his brilliant works Dos de Mayo and Tres de Mayo.) (loc 1306)

The French could eventually capture most Spanish cities and towns, but the countryside was far more difficult to subdue. As in the Kingdom of Naples, guerrilla bands took shape—in fact, the modern word "guerrilla," Spanish for "little war," dates from precisely these events. (loc 1326)

Napoleon's Russian campaign is best remembered for the frigid retreat, but the scorching summer advance proved almost as damaging to the Grande Armée. (loc 1432)

of the original 655,000-strong force, scarcely 85,000 men made it back out of Russia. Some 370,000 had died; 200,000 more were prisoners or missing. Napoleon himself left the army in early December and headed back to Paris. (loc 1467)

In the popular imagination, Napoleon's downfall proceeded directly from this catastrophe. Historians caution, however, that the emperor still controlled vast territories and could draw on unmatched human resources (loc 1471)

The campaigns of 1813, which Napoleon fought in Germany against the so-called Sixth Coalition, included several close-run battles that came close to reversing his fortunes. Napoleon showed no compunction in continuing the struggle and in sacrificing hundreds of thousands more (loc 1473)

the losses in Russia of horses, materiel, and experienced men told against him at several decisive moments. He also made his share of strategic mistakes, notably dividing his forces before the mammoth Battle of Leipzig in October and leaving a crucial detachment behind in the Saxon capital of Dresden. Leipzig, also known as the "Battle of the Nations," was the largest battle ever fought in European history up to that time, (loc 1557)

Over the next weeks, support for the Bourbons grew. Talleyrand felt the exiled family offered France the best chance of receiving a fair deal from the British, who would have a harder time taking advantage of a king they had long recognized, if only in name, as the country's legitimate sovereign. (Talleyrand also thought, needless to say, that Louis best served Talleyrand.) (loc 1600)

Less than a year after leaving France, Napoleon would return in secret, rally his supporters, and seize power for a second time. He would restore the Empire, resuscitate the Grande Armée, and march across the frontier to confront his enemies. Only after his defeat at Waterloo in June 1815 by Wellington would his fall from power become permanent. (loc 1626)

Had Louis submitted his new constitution to a plebiscite, as Napoleon had done, he might well have established his rule on a firm basis. But on this very point—popular sovereignty—he refused to make concessions. He was the chosen of God, and rather than accepting the constitution from the people, he insisted on "granting" it to them, while banishing the tricolor flag for which so many of them had died. (loc 1644)

The allies, however, had different ideas. Their representatives had been meeting since September in an unprecedented gathering, the Congress of Vienna, to plan the future of the continent. It would eventually produce one of the longest lasting and effective peace settlements in European history, based on a system whereby the great powers would cooperate to manage crises and avoid full-scale war. (loc 1670)

Waterloo itself immediately achieved legendary status as one of the greatest battles in history, but in truth it is hard to believe that a French victory there could have actually changed history. The forces deployed against France were simply too great, and the allies too determined. (loc 1685)

Napoleon spent these years seeking control not over Europe but over how history would remember him. It was the last chapter of his life but, more important, the first chapter of the longer, hugely contentious story of his historical significance. (loc 1716)

The "Concert of Europe" designed at Vienna by the allies, still reeling from two decades of intense Napoleonic conflict, succeeded in keeping a closely managed peace for longer than any previous European settlement and most subsequent ones as well (far better than Versailles, a century later). (loc 1727)

Bonapartism as a political model continued to have resonance worldwide. In December 1804, one onlooker at Napoleon's coronation had been an impressionable twenty-one year-old Venezuelan named Simon Bolívar. "The universal acclaim and the interest which his person inspired," Bolívar later remembered, "made me think of the slavery of my country, and the glory that would benefit the one who liberated it." (loc 1733)

French and German strategists of the late nineteenth century took inspiration from Napoleon in developing new tactical doctrines centered on massive, sacrificial infantry offensives—doctrines that led directly to the slaughterhouse of the World War I trenches. (loc 1747)

The greatest of French Romantic authors, Victor Hugo, the son of a Napoleonic general, wrestled with Napoleon's ghost all his life, lamenting the political tyranny and the human suffering but always hailing the "sublime spectacle." (loc 1781)

What an artist dies in him

His continuing popularity helps explain how one of the least competent political adventurers in European history nonetheless managed to become one of France's longest lasting rulers in the mid-nineteenth century. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the son of Napoleon's younger brother Louis, had his uncle's ambition but little of his charisma and none of his genius. (loc 1795)

in 1848 yet another French Revolution toppled King Louis-Philippe and replaced his reign with the unstable Second Republic. Amid fears of civil war, Louis-Napoleon won election as president and after three years of frustrating political conflict seized dictatorial power by force. In 1852 he proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III. (loc 1799)

it is hard not to endorse these criticisms of Napoleon. The man who boasted to Metternich of his indifference to millions of lives is hard indeed to admire. The reestablishment of slavery, the endless slaughter of the battlefields, the authoritarian rule, the imperial ventures, all make for a damning and lengthy indictment. (loc 1869)

History, in the end, is not a judicial procedure. It is a quest for understanding. And it is also a quest to expose the full, amazingly broad and varied canvas of human activity. And from this point of view, as Victor Hugo recognized very well, the "sublime spectacle" matters. Napoleon may have been, from many points of view, a criminal, but he was not a criminal on the scale of the twentieth-century dictators, who made mass murder and terror the basis of their social and political systems. For all his crimes and errors, his life also incarnated a sense of sheer human possibility that quite rightly fascinated onlookers at the time and has continued to do so ever since. We look at his life and recoil from parts of it in horror. But at the same time, inescapably, there is something that takes the breath away. As Shakespeare's Cassius said of Caesar, "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a Colossus." What a novel his life was. (loc 1876)

Many functions associated with perception, memory, and information processing are conducted prior to and independently of any conscious direction. What appears spontaneously in consciousness is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking. (loc 6540)

Weaknesses and biases inherent in human thinking processes can be demonstrated through carefully designed experiments. They can be alleviated by conscious application of tools and techniques that should be in the analytical tradecraft toolkit of all intelligence analysts. (loc 6542)

too often, newly acquired information is evaluated and processed through the existing analytic model, rather than being used to reassess the premises of the model itself. (loc 53)

Intelligence analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves. (loc 97)

Dick Heuer's writings make three fundamental points about the cognitive challenges intelligence analysts face:

• The mind is poorly "wired" to deal effectively with both inherent uncertainty (the natural fog surrounding complex, indeterminate intelligence issues) and induced uncertainty (the man-made fog fabricated by denial and deception operations).
• Even increased awareness of cognitive and other "unmotivated" biases, such as the tendency to see information confirming an already-held judgment more vividly than one sees "disconfirming" information, does little by itself to help analysts deal effectively with uncertainty.
• Tools and techniques that gear the analyst's mind to apply higher levels of critical thinking can substantially improve analysis on complex issues on which information is incomplete, ambiguous, and often deliberately distorted. Key examples of such intellectual devices include techniques for structuring information, challenging assumptions, and exploring alternative interpretations. (loc 206)

A central focus of this book is to illuminate the role of the observer in determining what is observed and how it is interpreted. People construct their own version of "reality" on the basis of information provided by the senses, but this sensory input is mediated by complex mental processes that determine which information is attended to, how it is organized, and the meaning attributed to it. (loc 349)

A prudent management system should:

• Encourage products that clearly delineate their assumptions and chains of inference and that specify the degree and source of uncertainty involved in the conclusions.
• Support analyses that periodically re-examine key problems from the ground up in order to avoid the pitfalls of the incremental approach.
• Emphasize procedures that expose and elaborate alternative points of view.

(loc 555)

We tend to perceive what we expect to perceive. A corollary of this principle is that it takes more information, and more unambiguous information, to recognize an unexpected phenomenon than an expected one. (loc 440)

mind-sets are neither good nor bad; they are unavoidable. People have no conceivable way of coping with the volume of stimuli that impinge upon their senses, or with the volume and complexity of the data they have to analyze, without some kind of simplifying preconceptions about what to expect, what is important, and what is related to what. (loc 469)

New information is assimilated to existing images. This principle explains why gradual, evolutionary change often goes unnoticed. It also explains the phenomenon that an intelligence analyst assigned to work on a topic or country for the first time may generate accurate insights that have been overlooked by experienced analysts who have worked on the same problem for 10 years. (loc 485)

Initial exposure to blurred or ambiguous stimuli interferes with accurate perception even after more and better information becomes available. This effect has been demonstrated experimentally by projecting onto a screen pictures of common, everyday subjects such as a dog standing on grass, a fire hydrant, and an aerial view of a highway cloverleaf intersection. The initial projection was blurred in varying degrees, and the pictures were then brought into focus slowly to determine at what point test subjects could identify them correctly. This experiment showed two things. First, those who started viewing the pictures when they were most out of focus had more difficulty identifying them when they became clearer than those who started viewing at a less blurred stage. In other words, the greater the initial blur, the clearer the picture had to be before people could recognize it. (loc 504)

The circumstances under which accurate perception is most difficult are exactly the circumstances under which intelligence analysis is generally conducted--dealing with highly ambiguous situations on the basis of information that is processed incrementally under pressure for early judgment. This is a recipe for inaccurate perception. (loc 523)

The contents of memory form a continuous input into the analytical process, and anything that influences what information is remembered or retrieved from memory also influences the outcome of analysis. (loc 585)

People make a choice where to focus their attention. They can concentrate on remembering or interpreting or taking notes on information received moments ago, or pay attention to information currently being received. Limitations on the capacity of short-term memory often preclude doing both. (loc 613)

Retrievability is influenced by the number of locations in which information is stored and the number and strength of pathways from this information to other concepts that might be activated by incoming information. The more frequently a path is followed, the stronger that path becomes and the more readily available the information located along that path. (loc 654)

When the position of chess pieces on the board corresponds to a recognized schema, it is very easy for the master to remember not only the positions of the pieces, but the outcomes of previous games in which the pieces were in these positions. Similarly, the unique abilities of the master analyst are attributable to the schemata in long-term memory that enable the analyst to perceive patterns in data that pass undetected by the average observer. (loc 690)

Substantive knowledge and analytical experience determine the store of memories and schemata the analyst draws upon to generate and evaluate hypotheses. The key is not a simple ability to recall facts, but the ability to recall patterns that relate facts to each other and to broader concepts--and to employ procedures that facilitate this process. (loc 744)

The intelligence analyst's function might be described as transcending the limits of incomplete information through the exercise of analytical judgment. (loc 840)

When resorting to an analogy, they tend to seize upon the first that comes to mind. They do not research more widely. Nor do they pause to analyze the case, test its fitness, or even ask in what ways it might be misleading. (loc 972)

When dealing with a new and unfamiliar subject, the uncritical and relatively non-selective accumulation and review of information is an appropriate first step. But this is a process of absorbing information, not analyzing it. Analysis begins when the analyst consciously inserts himself or herself into the process to select, sort, and organize information. This selection and organization can only be accomplished according to conscious or subconscious assumptions and preconceptions. (loc 993)

Objectivity is gained by making assumptions explicit so that they may be examined and challenged, not by vain efforts to eliminate them from analysis. (loc 1004)

The Intelligence Community as a whole is far stronger in situational logic than in theory. In my judgment, intelligence analysts do not generalize enough, as opposed to many academic scholars who generalize too much. (loc 1011)

When faced with an analytical problem, people are either unable or simply do not take the time to identify the full range of potential answers. Analytical performance might be significantly enhanced by more deliberate attention to this stage of the analytical process. (loc 1062)

Experienced analysts have an imperfect understanding of what information they actually use in making judgments. They are unaware of the extent to which their judgments are determined by a few dominant factors, rather than by the systematic integration of all available information. Analysts actually use much less of the available information than they think they do. (loc 1184)

In short, people's mental models are simpler than they think, and the analyst is typically unaware not only of which variables should have the greatest influence, but also which variables actually are having the greatest influence. (loc 1241)

In order to compare this verbal rationalization with the judgmental policy reflected in the stock market analysts' actual decisions, multiple regression analysis or other similar statistical procedures can be used to develop a mathematical model of how each analyst actually weighed and combined information on the relevant variables. […]
The mathematical model based on the analyst's actual decisions is invariably a more accurate description of that analyst's decision-making than the analyst's own verbal description of how the judgments were made. (loc 1255)

Try to break down your thesis/decision into its "regression components" – beta variable.

Analysts are often surprised to learn that what are to them self-evident truths are by no means self-evident to others, or that self-evident truth at one point in time may be commonly regarded as uninformed assumption 10 years later. (loc 1324)

According to the mosaic theory of intelligence, small pieces of information are collected that, when put together like a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle, eventually enable analysts to perceive a clear picture of reality. The analogy suggests that accurate estimates depend primarily upon having all the pieces, that is, upon accurate and relatively complete information. […]
Insights from cognitive psychology suggest that intelligence analysts do not work this way and that the most difficult analytical tasks cannot be approached in this manner. […]
A more accurate analogy for describing how intelligence analysis should work is medical diagnosis. The doctor observes indicators (symptoms) of what is happening, uses his or her specialized knowledge of how the body works to develop hypotheses that might explain these observations, conducts tests to collect additional information to evaluate the hypotheses, then makes a diagnosis. (loc 1344)

Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open. (loc 1387)

Analysts should keep a record of unexpected events and think hard about what they might mean, not disregard them or explain them away. It is important to consider whether these surprises, however small, are consistent with some alternative hypothesis. (loc 1526)
…
Failure to understand that others perceive their national interests differently from the way we perceive those interests is a constant source of problems in intelligence analysis. (loc 1468)

Strategic Assumptions vs. Tactical Indicators. Abraham Ben-Zvi analyzed five cases of intelligence failure to foresee a surprise attack. He made a useful distinction between estimates based on strategic assumptions and estimates based on tactical indications. Examples of strategic assumptions include the US belief in 1941 that Japan wished to avoid war at all costs because it recognized US military superiority, […]
whenever strategic assumptions and tactical indicators of impending attack converged, an immediate threat was perceived and appropriate precautionary measures were taken. When discrepancies existed between tactical indicators and strategic assumptions in the five cases Ben-Zvi analyzed, the strategic assumptions always prevailed, and they were never reevaluated in the light of the increasing flow of contradictory information. (loc 1538)

The spirit of decision analysis is to divide and conquer: Decompose a complex problem into simpler problems, get one's thinking straight in these simpler problems, paste these analyses together with a logical glue ... Externalization means getting the decomposed problem out of one's head and down on paper or on a computer screen in some simplified form that shows the main variables, parameters, or elements of the problem and how they relate to each other. (loc 1734)

Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, sometimes abbreviated ACH, is a tool to aid judgment on important issues requiring careful weighing of alternative explanations or conclusions. It helps an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult (loc 1840)

Analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH) requires an analyst to explicitly identify all the reasonable alternatives and have them compete against each other for the analyst's favor, rather than evaluating their plausibility one at a time. (loc 1850)

Solves the problem of recency bias!
…
For each hypothesis, ask yourself this question: If this hypothesis is true, what should I expect to be seeing or not seeing? What are all the things that must have happened, or may still be happening, and that one should expect to see evidence of? If you are not seeing this evidence, why not? (loc 1907)

Then analyze how each piece of evidence relates to each hypothesis. This differs from the normal procedure, which is to look at one hypothesis at a time in order to consider how well the evidence supports that hypothesis. That will be done later, in Step 5. (loc 1921)

In some cases it may be useful to refine this procedure by using a numerical probability, rather than a general notation such as plus or minus, to describe how the evidence relates to each hypothesis. To do this, ask the following question for each cell in the matrix: If this hypothesis is true, what is the probability that I would be seeing this item of evidence? (loc 1953)

The matrix should not dictate the conclusion to you. Rather, it should accurately reflect your judgment of what is important and how these important factors relate to the probability of each hypothesis. You, not the matrix, must make the decision. (loc 1992)

People formulate alternative explanations or estimates and select the one that encompasses the greatest amount of evidence within a logically consistent scenario. Under some circumstances, however, consistency can be deceptive. Information may be consistent only because it is highly correlated or redundant, in which case many related reports may be no more informative than a single report. (loc 2222)

Because of a need to impose order on our environment, we seek and often believe we find causes for what are actually accidental or random phenomena. People overestimate the extent to which other countries are pursuing a coherent, coordinated, rational plan, and thus also overestimate their own ability to predict future events in those nations. People also tend to assume that causes are similar to their effects, in the sense that important or large effects must have large causes. When inferring the causes of behavior, too much weight is accorded to personal qualities and dispositions of the actor and not enough to situational determinants of the actor's behavior. People also overestimate their own importance as both a cause and a target of the behavior of others. Finally, people often perceive relationships that do not in fact exist, because they do not have an intuitive understanding of the kinds and amount of information needed to prove a relationship. (loc 2339)

analysts tend to assume that economic events have primarily economic causes, that big events have important consequences, and that little events cannot affect the course of history. Such correspondence between cause and effect makes a more logical and persuasive--a more coherent--narrative, but there is little basis for expecting such inferences to correspond to historical fact. (loc 2439)

Intelligence analysts are familiar with the problem of weighing internal versus external causes of behavior in a number of contexts. When a new leader assumes control of a foreign government, analysts assess the likely impact of changed leadership on government policy. For example, will the former Defense Minister who becomes Prime Minister continue to push for increases in the defense budget? Analysts weigh the known predispositions of the new Prime Minister, based on performance in previous positions, against the requirements of the situation that constrain the available options. If relatively complete information is available on the situational constraints, analysts may make an accurate judgment on such questions. Lacking such information, they tend to err on the side of assuming that the individual's personal predispositions will prompt continuation of past behavior. (loc 2490)

This is one of the key ideas in Geopolitical Alpha – pay attention to the constraints of the situation vs individual desires.

The act of constructing a detailed scenario for a possible future event makes that event more readily imaginable and, therefore, increases its perceived probability. This is the experience of CIA analysts who have used various tradecraft tools that require, or are especially suited to, the analysis of unlikely but nonetheless possible and important hypotheses. (loc 2762)

Been there… when you've put a lot of effort into understanding a tail event, one can overestimate the odds of the event.
…
One technique for avoiding the anchoring bias, to weigh anchor so to speak, may be to ignore one's own or others' earlier judgments and rethink a problem from scratch. In other words, consciously avoid any prior judgment as a starting point. There is no experimental evidence to show that this is possible or that it will work, but it seems worth trying. Alternatively, it is sometimes possible to avoid human error by employing formal statistical procedures. (loc 2803)
…
Hindsight biases influence the evaluation of intelligence reporting in three ways: Analysts normally overestimate the accuracy of their past judgments. Intelligence consumers normally underestimate how much they learned from intelligence reports. Overseers of intelligence production who conduct postmortem analyses of an intelligence failure normally judge that events were more readily foreseeable than was in fact the case. (loc 2970)
…
It appears, however, that the receipt of what is accepted as definitive or authoritative information causes an immediate but unconscious restructuring of a person's mental images to make them consistent with the new information. Once past perceptions have been restructured, it seems very difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct accurately what one's thought processes were or would have been before this restructuring. (loc 3125)
…
Analysts should ask themselves, "If the opposite outcome had occurred, would I have been surprised?" Consumers should ask, "If this report had told me the opposite, would I have believed it?" And overseers should ask, "If the opposite outcome had occurred, would it have been predictable given the information that was available?" (loc 3129)
…

• Robert Jervis' Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1977);
• Graham Allison's Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Little, Brown, 1971);
• Ernest May's "Lessons" of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 1973);
• Ephraim Kam's, Surprise Attack (Harvard University Press, 1988);
• Richard Betts' "Analysis, War and Decision: Why Intelligence Failures Are Inevitable," World Politics, Vol. 31, No. 1 (October 1978);
• Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1970)
• Robin Hogarth's Judgement and Choice (John Wiley, 1980).

Part of this foreword is taken from a review of Roadside Picnic I wrote in 1977, the year the book first came out in English.* I wanted to keep some record of a reader's response at a time when the worst days of Soviet censorship were fresh in memory, and intellectually and morally interesting novels from Russia still had the glamour of risk-taking courage about them. A time, also, when a positive review of a work of Soviet science fiction was a small but real political statement in the United States, since part of the American science fiction community had undertaken to fight the Cold War by assuming every writer who lived behind the Iron Curtain was an enemy ideologue. (loc 22)

This use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen. (loc 53)

Those who want the genre to remain specialized—"hard"—tend to prefer the elitist style. Those who see science fiction simply as a way of writing novels welcome the more Tolstoyan approach, in which a war is described not only from the generals' point of view but also through the eyes of housewives, prisoners, and boys of sixteen, (loc 55)

"You are absolutely right. Our little town is a hole. Always was and always will be. Except right now," I say, "it's a hole into the future. And the stuff we fish out of this hole will change your whole stinking world. Life will be different, the way it should be, and no one will want for anything. That's our hole for you. There's knowledge pouring through this hole. And when we figure it out, we'll make everyone rich, and we'll fly to the stars, and we'll go wherever we want. That's the kind of hole we have here (loc 672)

And you know the amazing thing: I'm telling him this, and I completely believe in what I'm saying. And our Zone, the evil bitch, the murderess, is at that moment a hundred times dearer to me than all their Europes and Africas. (loc 686)

What do you actually think about the Visit? Even if not seriously." "Fine, I'll tell you. But I have to warn you, Richard, that your question falls under the umbrella of a pseudoscience called xenology. Xenology is an unnatural mixture of science fiction and formal logic. At its core is a flawed assumption—that an alien race would be psychologically human." "Why flawed?" asked Noonan. "Because biologists have already been burned attempting to apply human psychology to animals. Earth animals, I note." "Just a second," said Noonan. "That's totally different. We're talking about the psychology of intelligent beings." "True. And that would be just fine, if we knew what intelligence was." "And we don't?" asked Noonan in surprise. "Believe it or not, we don't. We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It's a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can't speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts." (loc 1875)

"A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras … A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about … Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp … and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone's handkerchief, someone's penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow …" "I get it," said Noonan. "A roadside picnic." (loc 1908)

'You ask: what makes man great?'" he quoted. "'Is it that he re-created nature? That he harnessed forces of almost-cosmic proportions? That in a brief time he has conquered the planet and opened a window onto the universe? No! It is that despite all this, he has survived, and intends to continue doing so.'" (loc 1921)

at first he didn't hear what this talking key was shouting, but then something seemed to switch on inside him, and he heard: "Happiness for everyone! Free! As much happiness as you want! Everyone gather round! Plenty for everyone! No one will be forgotten! Free! Happiness! Free!" With that he abruptly went quiet, as if a huge hand had forcefully shoved a gag into his mouth. And Redrick saw the transparent emptiness lurking in the shadow of the excavator bucket grab him, jerk him up into the air, and slowly, with an effort, twist him, the way a housewife wrings out the laundry. (loc 2709)

he was no longer trying to think. He just kept repeating to himself in despair, like a prayer, "I'm an animal, you can see that I'm an animal. I have no words, they haven't taught me the words; I don't know how to think, those bastards didn't let me learn how to think. But if you really are—all powerful, all knowing, all understanding—figure it out! Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I've never sold my soul to anyone! It's mine, it's human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can't be bad! The hell with it all, I just can't think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!" (loc 2749)

This was in July 1972 and, at the time, we were under price controls. The futures market was supposedly also under price controls. This was Nixon's price freeze? Yes. As I recall, the plywood price was theoretically frozen at $110 per 1,000 square feet. Plywood was one of the markets I analyzed for the firm. The price had edged up close to $110, and I put out a bearish newsletter saying even though supplies were tight, since prices couldn't go beyond $110, there was nothing to lose by going short at $110. […]
shortages developed in plywood, but supposedly the futures market was also under this guideline. However, no one was sure; it was sort of a gray area. One day, while I was looking at the quote board, the price hit $110. Then it hit $110.10; then $110.20. […]
If they let it trade over $110 today, they might let it trade anywhere. So I bought one contract. Well, ultimately, plywood went to $200. (loc 600)

During the great soybean bull market, the one that went from $3.25 to nearly $12, I impulsively took my profits and got out of everything. I was trying to be fancy instead of staying with the trend. Ed Seykota never would get out of anything unless the trend changed. So Ed was in, while I was out, and I watched in agony as soybeans went limit-up for twelve consecutive days. I was real competitive, and every day I would come into the office knowing he was in and I was out. I dreaded going to work, because I knew soybeans would be bid limit again and I couldn't get in. (loc 660)

The best trades are the ones in which you have all three things going for you: fundamentals, technicals, and market tone. First, the fundamentals should suggest that there is an imbalance of supply and demand, which could result in a major move. Second, the chart must show that the market is moving in the direction that the fundamentals suggest. Third, when news comes out, the market should act in a way that reflects the right psychological tone. For example, a bull market should shrug off bearish news and respond vigorously to bullish news. (loc 719)

Same advice as Mike Platt in Hedge Fund Market Wizards

I believe that the era of trend following is over until and unless there is a particular imbalance in a market that overrides everything else. [The 1988 drought in the grain belt, which developed shortly after this interview, provides a perfect example of the type of exception Marcus is describing.] Another exception would be if we were to enter a major inflationary or deflationary environment. (loc 762)

I remember one time, during late 1978, the dollar was getting battered, falling to new lows every day. This was during a period when I was cooperating and trading as a colleague with Bruce Kovner. We used to talk hours every day. One day, we noticed that the dollar got mysteriously strong. There was an intense price movement that couldn't be explained by any known information. We just bailed out of our long currency positions like crazy. That weekend, President Carter announced a dollar support program. If we had waited until the next U.S. trading session, we would have been annihilated. That situation illustrates one of the principles we believed in—namely, that the big players, including the governments, would always tip their hand. If we saw a surprise price move against us that we didn't understand, we often got out and looked for the reason later. (loc 792)

if a position doesn't feel right as soon as you put it on, don't be embarrassed to change your mind and get right out. (loc 926)

Is the implied rule that if you find a common behavior between markets, you want to sell the one that is lagging as soon as it starts heading down?
You absolutely want to put down a bet when a market acts terribly relative to everything else. When the news is wonderful and a market can't go up, then you want to be sure to be short. (loc 978)

losing begets losing. When you start losing, it touches off negative elements in your psychology; it leads to pessimism. (loc 1040)

When a market moves counter to my expectations, I have always been able to say, "I had hoped to make a lot of money in this position, but it isn't working, so I'm getting out." (loc 1045)

following the advice of others, even when they are good traders, often leads to problems as it combines the worst elements of both traders. (loc 1116)

After graduating from Harvard, Kovner taught political science courses at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. […]
He read everything he could get his hands on. One subject he studied intensively was interest rate theory. "I fell in love with the yield curve." (loc 1144)

my decision to lift the short side of my spread position in the middle of a panic showed a complete disregard for risk. I think what bothered me so much was the realization that I had lost a process of rationality that I thought I had. At that moment, I realized that the markets were truly capable of taking money away every bit as fast as they gave it to you. (loc 1219)

Introspection to realise when his rationality was compromised

To this day, when something happens to disturb my emotional equilibrium and my sense of what the world is like, I close out all positions related to that event.
Do you have a recent example?
October 19, 1987—the week of the stock market crash. I closed out all my positions on October 19 and 20 because I felt there was something happening in the world that I didn't understand. The first rule of trading—there are probably many first rules—is don't get caught in a situation in which you can lose a great deal of money for reasons you don't understand. (loc 1240)

I have the ability to imagine configurations of the world different from today and really believe it can happen. I can imagine that soybean prices can double or that the dollar can fall to 100 yen. Second, I stay rational and disciplined under pressure. (loc 1268)

[Good traders] are strong, independent, and contrary in the extreme. They are able to take positions others are unwilling to take. They are disciplined enough to take the right size positions. A greedy trader always blows out. (loc 1276)

Is the generalization of that example that when an important fundamental development occurs, the initial direction of the market move is often a good tip-off of the longer-term trend?
Exactly. The market usually leads because there are people who know more than you do. (loc 1305)

Technical analysis reflects the vote of the entire marketplace and, therefore, does pick up unusual behavior. By definition, anything that creates a new chart pattern is something unusual. It is very important for me to study the details of price action to see if I can observe something about how everybody is voting. Studying the charts is absolutely crucial and alerts me to existing disequilibria and potential changes. (loc 1332)

Tight congestions in which a breakout occurs for reasons that nobody understands are usually good risk/reward trades.
How about breakouts that occur because there is a story in the Wall Street Journal that day?
That would be much less relevant. The Heisenberg principle in physics provides an analogy for the markets. If something is closely observed, the odds are it is going to be altered in the process. If corn is in a tight consolidation and then breaks out the day the Wall Street Journal carries a story about a potential shortage of corn, the odds of the price move being sustained are much smaller. If everybody believes there is no reason for corn to break out, and it suddenly does, the chances that there is an important underlying cause are much greater. (loc 1343)

Whenever I enter a position, I have a predetermined stop. That is the only way I can sleep. I know where I'm getting out before I get in. The position size on a trade is determined by the stop, and the stop is determined on a technical basis. For example, if the market is in the midst of a trading range, it makes no sense to put your stop within that range, since you are likely to be taken out. I always place my stop beyond some technical barrier. (loc 1363)

the principal characteristic of a bear market is very sharp down movements followed by quick retracements. I would always sell too late and then get stopped out in what subsequently proved to be part of a wide-swinging congestion pattern. In a bear market, you have to use sharp countertrend rallies to enter positions. (loc 1454)

Can you talk about your fundamental analysis methodology? How do you determine what the right price for a market should be?
I assume that the price for a market on any given day is the correct price, then I try to figure out what changes are occurring that will alter that price. One of the jobs of a good trader is to imagine alternative scenarios. I try to form many different mental pictures of what the world should be like and wait for one of them to be confirmed. You keep trying them on one at a time. Inevitably, most of these pictures will turn out to be wrong—that is, only a few elements of the picture may prove correct. But then, all of a sudden, you will find that in one picture, nine out of ten elements click. That scenario then becomes your image of the world reality. (loc 1501)

For me, market analysis is like a tremendous multidimensional chess board. The pleasure of it is purely intellectual. For example, it is trying to figure out the problems the finance minister of New Zealand faces and how he may try to solve them. A lot of people will think that sounds ridiculously exotic. But to me, it isn't exotic at all. Here is a guy running this tiny country and he has a real set of problems. He has to figure how to cope with Australia, the U.S., and the labor unions that are driving him crazy. My job is to do the puzzle with him and figure out what he is going to decide, and what the consequences of his actions will be that he or the market doesn't anticipate. That to me, in itself, is tremendous fun. (loc 1553)

The stock market has far more short-term countertrends. After the market has gone up, it always wants to come down. The commodity markets are driven by supply and demand for physical goods; if there is a true shortage, prices will tend to keep trending higher. (loc 1614)

What advice would you give the novice trader?
First, I would say that risk management is the most important thing to be well understood. Undertrade, undertrade, undertrade is my second piece of advice. Whatever you think your position ought to be, cut it at least in half. My experience with novice traders is that they trade three to five times too big. (loc 1651)

What is the most important advice you could give the novice trader?
Trade small because that's when you are as bad as you are ever going to be. Learn from your mistakes. Don't be misled by the day-to-day fluctuations in your equity. Focus on whether what you are doing is right, not on the random nature of any single trade's outcome. (loc 2188)

Jones has succeeded in every major venture he has tried. He started out in the business as a broker and in his second year grossed over $1 million in commissions. In fall 1980, Jones went to the New York Cotton Exchange as an independent floor trader. Again he was spectacularly successful, making millions during the next few years. (loc 2222)

Jones speaks with admiration about his first tutor in the business, the legendary cotton trader, Eli Tullis. Perhaps the one trait of Tullis that made the greatest impression on Jones was his steel-hard emotional control. He recalls how Tullis could carry on a polite, relaxed conversation with visitors, without blinking an eye, at the same time his positions were getting decimated in the market. (loc 2250)

Tullis taught me about moving volume. When you are trading size, you have to get out when the market lets you out, not when you want to get out. He taught me that if you want to move a large position, you don't wait until the market is in new high or low ground because very little volume may trade there if it is a turning point. (loc 2312)

if, for example, the old high was at 56.80, there are probably going to be a lot of buy stops at 56.85. If the market is trading at 70 bid, 75 offered, the whole trading ring has a vested interest in buying the market, touching off those stops, and liquidating into the stops—that is a very common ring practice. As an upstairs trader, I put that together with what Eli taught me. If I want to cover a position in that type of situation, I will liquidate half at 75, so that I won't have to worry about getting out of the entire position at the point where the stops are being hit. I will always liquidate half my position below new highs or lows and the remaining half beyond that point.
Any other lessons you can attribute to Tullis?
By watching Eli, I learned that even though markets look their very best when they are setting new highs, that is often the best time to sell. He instilled in me the idea that, to some extent, to be a good trader, you have to be a contrarian.
You have done tens of thousands of trades. Is there any single trade that stands out?
Yes, the 1979 cotton market. One learns the most from mistakes, not successes. I was a broker back then. We had lots of speculative accounts and I was long about 400 contracts of July cotton. The market had been trading in a range between 82 and 86 cents, and I was buying it every time it came down to the low end of that range. One day, the market broke to new lows, took out the stops, and immediately rebounded about 30 or 40 points. I thought the reason the market had been acting so poorly was because of the price vulnerability implied by the proximity of those well-known stops. Now that the stops had been touched off, I thought the market was ready to rally. I was standing outside the ring at the time. In an act of bravado, I told my floor broker to bid 82.90 for 100 July, which at the time was a very big order. He bid 90 for 100, and I remember the Refco broker came running across the pit screaming, "Sold!" Refco owned most of the certificated stock at that time [the type of cotton available for delivery against the contract]. In an instant I realized that they intended to deliver against the July contract, which then was trading at about a 4-cent premium to the October contract. It also dawned on me that the whole congestion pattern that had formed between 82 and 86 cents was going to be a market measurement for the next move down [the break from 82 cents was going to equal the width of the prior 4-cent trading range]. (loc 2315)

The most important rule of trading is to play great defense, not great offense. Every day I assume every position I have is wrong. I know where my stop risk points are going to be. I do that so I can define my maximum possible drawdown. Hopefully, I spend the rest of the day enjoying positions that are going in my direction. If they are going against me, then I have a game plan for getting out. Don't be a hero. Don't have an ego. Always question yourself and your ability. Don't ever feel that you are very good. The second you do, you are dead. (loc 2401)

one of my strengths is that I view anything that has happened up to the present point in time as history. I really don't care about the mistake I made three seconds ago in the market. What I care about is what I am going to do from the next moment on. (loc 2460)

Every breath is a new me.

we have found one that actually works well. It is a very good system, but for obvious reasons, I can't tell you much more about it.
What type of realm does it fall into: contrarian? trend following?
Trend following. The basic premise of the system is that markets move sharply when they move. If there is a sudden range expansion in a market that has been trading narrowly, human nature is to try to fade that price move. When you get a range expansion, the market is sending you a very loud, clear signal that the market is getting ready to move in the direction of that expansion. (loc 2530)

What are the key factors you focus on in fundamentally evaluating the T-bond market?
The economy is definitely the single most important factor. Four other important elements are inflation expectations, the dollar, the trade balance, and the budget deficit. (loc 2697)

When you are starting out, it is very important not to get too far behind because it is very difficult to fight back. Most traders have a tendency to take risks that are too large at the beginning. They tend not to be selective enough about when they take risks. (loc 2758)

There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders. (loc 2936)

What are the trading rules you live by?
a. Cut losses.
b. Ride winners.
c. Keep bets small.
d. Follow the rules without question.
e. Know when to break the rules. (loc 3029)

I don't think traders can follow rules for very long unless they reflect their own trading style. Eventually, a breaking point is reached and the trader has to quit or change, or find a new set of rules he can follow. This seems to be part of the process of evolution and growth of a trader. (loc 3038)

Hegelian dialectic

Gut feel is important. If ignored, it may come out in subtle ways by coloring your logic. (loc 3048)

I don't think it makes any more sense trying to understand the stock market than trying to understand music. A lot of people would rather understand the market than make money. (loc 3098)
"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" – Zappa.

Luck plays an enormous role in trading success. Some people were lucky enough to be born smart, while others were even smarter and got born lucky. (loc 3114)

Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money. (loc 3153)

When I was a broker, my boss taught me that if you don't call your client when he is losing money, someone else will. (loc 3282)

if you never bet your lifestyle, from a trading standpoint, nothing bad will ever happen to you. Second, if you know what the worst possible outcome is, it gives you tremendous freedom. (loc 3303)

This is a good argument against lifestyle creep.

When a market makes a historic high, it is telling you something. No matter how many people tell you why the market shouldn't be that high, or why nothing has changed, the mere fact that the price is at a new high tells you something has changed. (loc 3438)

I have two basic rules about winning in trading as well as in life: (1) If you don't bet, you can't win. (2) If you lose all your chips, you can't bet. (loc 3457)

the first thing I learned about how to get superior performance is not to buy stocks that are near their lows, but to buy stocks that are coming out of broad bases and beginning to make new highs relative to the preceding price base. You are trying to find the beginning of a major move so that you don't waste six or nine months sitting in a stock that is going nowhere. (loc 3962)

Top formations in the market averages occur in only one of two ways. First, the average moves up to a new high, but does so on low volume. This tells you that the demand for stocks is poor at that point and that the rally is vulnerable. Second, volume surges for several days, but there is very little, if any, upside price progress as measured by market closes. In this latter case, there may not be a pickup in volume when the market initially tops, since the distribution has taken place on the way up. (loc 4026)

If the stocks that have been leading the bull market start breaking down, that is a major sign the market has topped. Another important factor to watch is the Federal Reserve discount rate. Usually, after the Fed raises the rate two or three times, the market runs into trouble. (loc 4031)

I make it a rule never to lose more than a maximum of 7 percent on any stock I buy. If a stock drops 7 percent below my purchase price, I will automatically sell it at the market—no second-guessing, no hesitation. (loc 4056)

First, you should hold a stock as long as it is performing properly. Jesse Livermore said, "It is never your thinking that makes big money, it's the sitting." Second, you have to realize that you will never sell the exact top. Therefore, it is ridiculous to kick yourself when a stock goes higher after you sell. The goal is to make substantial profits on your stocks and not be upset if the price continues to advance after you get out. (loc 4076)

The volume in a stock is a measure of supply and demand. When a stock is beginning to move into new high ground, volume should increase by at least 50 percent over the average daily volume in recent months. (loc 4117)

A stock which is at new highs has much more of an open running field?
Right, because no one ahead of you is at a loss and wants to get out at the first opportunity. Everybody has a profit; everybody is happy. (loc 4432)

When a stock that has been moving up starts consolidating, you want to see volume dry up. You should see a downtrend in volume. Then when volume starts picking up again, it usually means the stock is ready to blast off. (loc 4464)

When the market, or a stock, is bottoming, you want to see increased volume combined with an absence of further price progress on the downside. (loc 4471)

Looking for evidence of dip buying

When did you turn from a loser to a winner? When I was able to separate my ego needs from making money. When I was able to accept being wrong. (loc 4702)

This next rule is a major problem for me; I'm always trying not to break it. The rule: Bottom fishing is one of the most expensive forms of gambling. (loc 4891)

his approach of sharply reducing position size after large losses, as well as extended winning streaks, contributes heavily to his success. (loc 4982)

I was fascinated with Schwartz's observation about maintaining a position that you are worried about, when the market action doesn't justify your fears. (loc 4987)

One of the best rules anybody can learn about investing is to do nothing, absolutely nothing, unless there is something to do. (loc 5048)

Why did you use 1937 as an analogy as opposed to 1929–1930?
Because 1929–1930 went on to be a major depression. I knew we were going to have a bear market caused by a major financial collapse. I was not convinced we were going to have a depression. I was differentiating between a financial and economic collapse. (loc 5120)

Why were you expecting a financial collapse?
It was the atmosphere. Money was flooding the world. Every stock market in the world was at an all-time high. You had all these stories of young guys, three years out of school, making half a million dollars a year. That is not reality. (loc 5127)

When did you cover your positions?
During the week of October 19. If you remember, by that time, everybody thought that the financial structure of America was over.
Did you cover then because we had hysteria going the other way?
That is exactly right. That week was a textbook case of hysteria. Under those kind of conditions, if you are still solvent, you have to step in there and go against it. Maybe that was going to be the one time it was the end of the world, and I would have been wiped out too. (loc 5135)

I start by finding the anomalous years in a long-term historical chart. When I see a picture like the 1861 cotton market, I ask myself, "What caused that? Why did that happen?" Then I try to figure it out. From that, you learn an enormous amount. (loc 5407)

This seems like an important exercise because it shows you what fundamental conditions are required for there to be huge moves.

Is that a general principle: When government measures are implemented to counteract a trend, you should sell the rally after the government action?
Absolutely. It should be written down as an axiom that you always invest against the central banks. When the central banks try to prop up a currency, go the other way. (loc 5537)

Governments have a bad track record of defending pegs, but at the same time, don't fight the fed?

The book I learned the most from was Technical Analysis of Stock Trends by Robert D. Edwards and John Magee (loc 6055)

This is my view of a year in the life of a trader: Four out of twelve months you are hot. You are so excited that you can't sleep at night. You can't wait to get to work the next day; you're just rolling. Two months out of the year, you are cold. You are so cold, you are miserable. You can't sleep at night. You can't figure out where the next trade is going to come from. The other six months out of the year, you make and lose, make and lose. You can't sleep, because you are trying to figure out how you are going to make money. (loc 6215)

How do you handle a losing streak?
I instinctively trade smaller and sometimes I just take a break. It is a good habit to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. (loc 6368)

often the worst time to bail out of a position is during a violent price move against you. Baldwin's point is that by bearing the pain just a little longer, you may be able to find a more favorable circumstance for liquidating. (loc 6695)

Not entirely inconsistent with the "get out when you are wrong" rule.

the psychological factor has five areas. These include a well-rounded personal life, a positive attitude, the motivation to make money, lack of conflict, and responsibility for results. Motivation to make money is not significantly correlated with success, but I keep it in the test because lack of such motivation plus high conflict is very significant. (loc 7100)

The composite profile of a losing trader would be someone who is highly stressed and has little protection from stress, has a negative outlook on life and expects the worst, has a lot of conflict in his/her personality, and blames others when things go wrong. Such a person would not have a set of rules to guide their behavior and would be more likely to be a crowd follower. In addition, losing traders tend to be disorganized and impatient. They want action now. (loc 7110)

What typically happens is that when people approach the markets, they bring their personal problems with them. The markets are a natural place to act out those problems, but not to solve them. (loc 7157)

Stress really takes two forms: worry and the biological fight/flight response. Our brains have a limited capacity for processing information. If your mind is preoccupied with worry, that worry takes up most of the decision space, and you don't have enough capacity left to perform effectively. (loc 7175)

The Army modeled the rifle skills of the two best sharpshooters in the U.S. They were then able to develop a training class for Army recruits in which they reduced the training time from four to two days, while increasing the qualification rate from 80 to 100 percent. (loc 7243)

Generally, I find that top traders believe: Money is NOT important. It is OK to lose in the markets. Trading is a game. Mental rehearsal is important for success. They've won the game before they start. (loc 7263)

justified confidence comes from extensive testing of some sort of model of trading. If you don't have a model that you have properly tested, then your confidence is probably misplaced. (loc 7283)

The best thing an investor can do, when things go wrong, is to determine how he or she produced those results. Now, I don't mean that you should blame yourself for your mistakes either. I mean that at some point in time, for any situation, you made a choice that produced those results. Determine what that choice point was and give yourself other options to take when you encounter a similar choice point in the future. Change the decision at similar choice points in the future and you will change the results you get. (loc 7299)

Results usually stem from some sort of mental state. Common examples are: I'm too impatient with the markets. I get angry at the markets. I'm afraid at the wrong time. I'm too optimistic about what will happen. (loc 7305)

Suppose you are at your desk and you become aware that you are in a mental state that you would like to change. Get up out of the chair. Walk away about four feet and then look at how you looked in that chair. Notice your posture, your breathing, your facial expressions. Then imagine how you would look if you had the sort of mental state you would like. When you can see that clearly, sit down in the chair again and assume the position that you just imagined. (loc 7320)

Traders fail not so much because of the trades they make when they are wrong, but rather because of the trades they don't make when they are right. It is quite common for traders to be right on their market call, but to fail to implement a position and profit from their market assessment. It is not enough being right; you have to make sure that you make money when you are right. (loc 7594)

Avoid annual return targets. Trades should be determined by opportunities, not an artificial goal set by the trader. An annual return expectation will lead a trader to trade too small when opportunities are exceptionally favorable and too large when opportunities are absent. (loc 7706)

He daily sipped large quantities of whiskey or brandy, heavily diluted with water or soda. Despite this, his liver, inspected after his death, was found to be as perfect as a young child's. Churchill was capable of tremendous physical and intellectual efforts, of high intensity over long periods, often with little sleep. But he had corresponding powers of relaxation, filled with a variety of pleasurable occupations, and he also had the gift of taking short naps when time permitted. (loc 74)

He loved the procedure of cigar smoking more than the smoking itself—one reason he never had any smoke-produced trouble with his lungs. […]
As for his consumption of hard liquor, he never gulped but sipped, slowly and at long intervals. (loc 824)

Churchill was now in the House of Commons. But what for? Personal advancement, certainly. He thirsted for office, power, and the chance to make history. (loc 230)

"Mr. Churchill, sir, to what do you attribute your success in life?" Without pause or hesitation, he replied: "Conservation of energy. Never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down." (loc 79)

"Winston works night and day. He is well, thank God, and gets tired only if he does not get his 8 hours' sleep—he does not need it at a stretch, but if he does not get that amount in the 24 he gets weary." (loc 1190)

Insofar as Churchill had a religion, it was the British constitution, spirit and letter: Parliament was the church in which he worshipped and whose decisions he obeyed. All this balanced and sanctified the huge power he possessed and exercised. (loc 1246)

Given Churchill's adventurous and reckless nature, and his appetite for sensation, his fidelity is notable. (loc 339)

He had discovered a new field to conquer with his audacity. Painting, after politics and the family, became his chief passion, and he painted for the rest of his life, as the perfect relaxation from his tremendous cares. (loc 646)

Churchill had a pernicious habit, which did him infinite harm, of overrunning the boundaries between the various government departments and speaking in cabinet—without being invited by the prime minister—on issues which were not his direct concern. (loc 838)

A month later all [of his investments] had gone with the wind as the great Wall Street crash reverberated through the skyscraper canyons. […] McGowan had been investing his funds "on margin" (something Churchill did not understand), so he not only lost all his money but had to buy himself out of the mess. (loc 994)

Churchill was a punter

In 1911 Asquith, hearing the rumbles of war grow louder, transferred Churchill to the Admiralty. (loc 465)

He began the historic switch from coal to oil, and in the process laid down a new class, the Queen Elizabeth, of huge, oil-burning battleships. He created the naval air service, and begged his ship architects to design him aircraft carriers. (loc 477)

The Germans began building their High Seas Fleet, as they called it, in the late 1880s, and continued to increase the rate of ship construction, especially of armored, big-gun battleships, over the next twenty years. It was this plainly anti-British construction program which turned public opinion, hitherto pro-German, if anything, against what were now referred to as "the Huns." (loc 493)

The [First] war, in many ways, proved a disaster for Churchill. But on his downfall, Lord Kitchener, who had been made chief warlord at the outset, reassured him, "There is one thing, at least, they can never take away from you—when the war began you had the fleet ready." (loc 533)

So Churchill was out and had to watch, impotent and silent, while the politicians, admirals, and generals compounded their mistakes and the operation, after a quarter of a million casualties, ended in ignominious evacuation. (loc 624)

So the Dardanelles disaster became identified with Churchill and the fury this aroused persisted until 1940, and even beyond, especially among the Tories and a huge chunk of the public. It was the lowest time in Churchill's life. (loc 628)

by July 1917 Lloyd George felt strong enough to bring back Churchill and made him minister of munitions. This was a brilliant move, and Churchill rapidly made himself one of the most efficient departmental ministers in British history. It was a confused ministry which had grown up haphazardly during the war and was a maze of duplications, contradictions, and bureaucratic gang warfare. In a short time of fanatical hard work Churchill made it simple, logical, and efficient. He forged a close link with the front to ensure the troops got exactly the right weapons and ammunition they wanted, in the right quantities. He visited the front constantly, and Haig was so impressed by the improvement in supplies that he completely reversed his opinion of Churchill and let him use the Château Verchocq near Calais. (loc 675)

His ideas, when they prospered, sometimes had a huge effect on the future. When they foundered, they left a desolating feeling of what might have been. He regarded Lenin's Bolshevik coup of November 1917, his subsequent murder of the czar and his family, and the creation of a Communist state as one of the great crimes of history. He was determined to reverse it and sent troops and armies to Russia through Archangel. This intervention had begun before Churchill took over the War Office but he increased its scale and inflated it with his rhetoric, and had he been allowed he would have done more, and for longer. It did not seem to be working, and his colleagues insisted he pull out. Once again, he was "conspicuous," and got all the blame. In a sense it was another Dardanelles. If it had succeeded, more than 20 million Russian lives would have been saved from starvation, murder, and death in the gulag. It is most unlikely that, with Bolshevism crushed, Mussolini could have come to power in Italy, or still less, Hitler in Germany. (loc 696)

Baldwin, a fellow Old Harrovian, took the opposite view of Churchill to Bonar Law's: "I would rather have him making private trouble in the Cabinet than public trouble outside it." He said, half joking, "I wish to make a Cabinet of which Harrow can be proud," and had Churchill into Number Ten. Churchill was expecting little, and when Baldwin said, "I want you to be Chancellor," he thought it meant of the Duchy of Lancaster, the nonjob he had held in the dark days of 1915. He was tempted to refuse, when Baldwin added, "Chancellor of the Exchequer, of course." (loc 854)

Churchill introduced five budgets, each with a two-hour speech of pellucid clarity, superbly delivered in majestic language—the best by far since Gladstone's golden age and never equaled since. They were immensely popular in Parliament and the country, since they made MPs feel they understood difficult problems of finance and economics, and the population as a whole felt that the man in charge of the national accounts blended prudence and generosity, compassion and common sense, with wit and grandeur. (loc 868)

His first budget, in 1925, was the most celebrated because in it he not only reduced income tax but also brought Britain back to the gold standard at the prewar parity. No decision in the whole of Churchill's life has been more criticized, then and since. (loc 873)

Churchill was by nature an expansionist, especially in his private finances, where he never stinted but simply worked harder to pay the bills. But over four months he gradually allowed himself to be persuaded to go for gold. (loc 885)
Keynes attacked him with a famous pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill. After World War II, when Keynesianism became the orthodoxy, Churchill was condemned on all sides and he himself admitted he was wrong. Later still, however, when Thatcherism became the vogue, Churchill was vindicated. (loc 887)

Churchill's tenure of the exchequer had more serious consequences in a field where he might have been expected to be more sensible: defense. Here he changed his persona completely. From the first lord of the Admiralty who had built up the fleet to over a thousand warships, he reverted to his father's policy of stinginess to the armed services, […]
It meant Britain emerged from the twenties seriously underarmed for a world power.
…

[Japan and the Fall of Singapore]
Japan, hitherto a staunch friend of Britain's, had changed from an ally into a potential enemy. […]
Britain agreed, under pressure from America, which was strongly anti-Japanese, to substitute an international agreement known as the Washington Naval Disarmament Treaty. […]
Churchill's blindness to the power and intentions of the Japanese extended to the vulnerability of the new base being built in Singapore. […] it never seems to have occurred to him that the Japanese army could overwhelm it by land, sweeping through Malaya. When this happened, of course, he blamed himself—he never shrank from accepting responsibility when it was just—but it must be admitted he was a prime author of the British debacle in the Far East in 1941-42. (loc 958)

To add to Churchill's difficulties, the one issue on which public opinion was roused—the Italian conquest of Abyssinia—had the effect of working against British interests by driving Italy into Hitler's arms. Churchill did not care much about the Abyssinian issue, though he opposed the act of aggression in principle, nor did he see Italy (as Anthony Eden did) as a major threat to peace, more dangerous than Hitler. It was one of Churchill's skills that he could distinguish between levels of power and threat, at any rate in Europe. He thought it was important to keep Italy on Britain's side, as it had been in the Great War, and so keep the Mediterranean firmly under the control of the Royal Navy and the imperial lifeline to India safe. (loc 1089)
…
Then the abdication came out of the blue to mesmerize and inflame the nation, to direct attention totally from the external threat, and to show Churchill at his worst. (loc 1106)

Churchill gave an excessively strong defense of Edward VIII after his abdication.

would the Allies have been better advised to fight over Czechoslovakia in autumn 1938 than over Poland in 1939? Churchill was quite clear at the time that the answer was yes. The British were now rearming, and Churchill was told that by the end of the year Britain's production of military aircraft would be faster than Germany's. […]
His case was this: French morale was beginning to sag and it was vital it should not sag further. It had coordinated its army plans in conjunction with the Poles, Yugoslavs, and above all the Czechs. Germany's claim to the Czech Sudetenland, the essence of the crisis, was designed not to rectify the injustice of Versailles but to knock the Czechs out of the military equation. (loc 1140)

When Hitler occupied Austria in 1938, he not only released four German divisions for service against France but took over six Austrian ones for retraining under the Nazi flag. The Czech business repeated this switch in the military arithmetic on a much bigger scale. (loc 1144)

In January 1939 Hitler took the decision to build an immense fleet of battleships, 3 battle cruisers, 4 aircraft carriers, and no less than 249 submarines. So far as Britain was concerned this was a declaration of war. On March 15 he invaded the remains of Czechoslovakia and annexed them, exactly as Churchill had said. A week later he began to threaten Poland. In April, Mussolini, satisfied that democracy was dead and that "the age of force had arrived," invaded and annexed Albania. In Spain, the military chiefs led by Franco and assisted by Hitler and Mussolini defeated the republican government. Britain and France guaranteed Poland against invasion, and Chamberlain made feeble attempts to draw Russia into a defensive alliance against Hitler. But Hitler easily trumped that and sent his agents to Moscow to sign a pact with Stalin, under which Poland was to be divided between Nazis and Communists, and Russia given a free hand to annex the Baltic states. This was August 1939. The Nazi invasion of Poland followed inevitably on September 1, and Britain and France declared war two days later. (loc 1169)

Hard as Churchill worked, however, he had little power in the general conduct of the war, which languished in inactivity—it was known as "the Phony War"—leaving the initiative to Hitler. (loc 1199)

Twelve hours earlier the Germans had begun the decisive campaign against France. Early reports were bad as Churchill was forming his cabinet. He did not get to bed till 3:00 a.m. But his courage was high. He recorded: I was conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial. Ten years in the political wilderness had freed me from ordinary party antagonisms. My warnings over the past six years had been so numerous, so detailed and were now so terribly vindicated, that no one could gainsay me. I could not be reproached either for making the war or with want of preparation for it. I thought I knew a good deal about it all and I was sure I would not fail. Therefore, although impatient for the morning, I slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams. Facts are better than dreams. (loc 1215)

"Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival." The last words were of deadly significance, and felt to be so. For Britain was not facing defeat in the sense that it had been defeated in the American War of Independence. It was facing extinction as a free country. (loc 1261)

within a month of taking office, amid the unmitigated catastrophe of France's fall, Churchill was able to report a British victory—Dunkirk—and to speak glowingly of "the Dunkirk spirit." It was in a sense a bogus victory, for the troops had been forced to leave their heavy equipment behind, and in many cases even their rifles, which they had smashed before embarking. But Dunkirk nevertheless gave a huge boost to British morale: (loc 1273)

the Germans, while overwhelmingly behind the campaign against Versailles, had no desire to see Hitler turn Europe into a servile German empire, let alone lead them into a world war. When Hitler marched into Prague in March 1939 it was his first unpopular act. Until now he had ruled mainly by consent. Thereafter it was by force and fear. (loc 1300)

the first true victory Britain won in the war was the victory of oratory and symbolism. Churchill was responsible for both. (loc 1327)

By mid-September, the Battle of Britain was won. The sign of defeat was the German decision to switch to night bombing raids on British cities. These caused misery and some loss of civilian life, but the move from hard to soft targets was strategically very welcoming and encouraging for Churchill. As early as August 20 he scented victory and was able to report to the Commons in a speech which contained the memorable tribute to the RAF fighter pilots: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." (loc 1342)

The moment it became clear that an invasion of Britain was unlikely (Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely on September 17, 1940), every available aircraft and tank was sent to the Middle East. (loc 1357)

Rapid triage and realignment of priorities.

Hitler was soon driven to manufacturing an inferior form of gasoline known as ersatz, one of many German words eagerly adopted by the British (blitz was another) as a subtle sign that they were capable of swallowing the enemy: Churchill encouraged the trend—kaput became a favorite term of his (loc 1361)

Words have power

the Nazis never suspected their codes were broken and continued to use them to the end. The excerpts persuaded Churchill that Hitler intended to invade Russia in May. By coming to the aid of Italy in Greece, Hitler was forced to postpone the invasion till the second half of June 1941, which in practice made it impossible for him to take Moscow and Leningrad before the winter set in. So the attack on Russia, instead of being a blitzkrieg, became a hard slog. (loc 1381)

did Churchill save Britain? The answer must be yes. No one else could have done it. This was what was felt at the time by the great majority of the British people, and it has been since confirmed by the facts and documents at our disposal. (loc 1406)

In some ways the first half of 1942 was the worst period of the war for him, for any disasters due to mistakes could no longer be blamed on anyone else. He blamed himself bitterly for underestimating the power and malevolence of Japan, for allowing two capital ships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, to be sent to sea without air cover, both being sunk with almost all hands, and for the fall of Singapore. There were disastrous reverses in North Africa, where Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps proved, for their numbers, the most successful German army of the entire war. Worst of all there were heavy sinkings of Allied supply ships in the North Atlantic, (loc 1432)

Shortly after the tide turned again. Churchill got himself a winning general in Africa in the shape of Bernard Montgomery, who (like Nelson) also possessed a gift for turning himself into a national hero. He beat Rommel at the decisive battle of El Alamein in November 1942, and this prepared the way for Allied landings in North Africa, (loc 1447)

In attacking Germany, Churchill was never held back by humanitarian motives. The destruction of Dresden on the night of February 13-14, 1945, when between 25,000 and 40,000 men, women, and children were killed, was authorized by him personally. (loc 1534)

Overlord might have failed or proved extremely costly had not a highly successful deception plan persuading the Germans that the Normandy landings were a feint and that the real invasion was planned for the Pas de Calais area—another idea of Churchill's—prevented a massive German counterattack in the early stages. (loc 1555)

The delay occasioned by Churchill's ensuring the invasion succeeded necessarily meant the Western forces were behind the Russians in pushing into the heart of the Nazi empire. This had grave political consequences. Churchill sought to mitigate them by demanding a full-speed drive to Berlin by the Anglo-American forces. This was supported by Montgomery, the army group commander, who was sure it was possible and would end the war in autumn 1944, with the West in Berlin first. But Eisenhower, the supreme commander, thought it was risky and insisted on a "broad front" advance, which meant that the war continued into the spring of 1945, and that the Russians got to Berlin first—and Prague, Budapest, Vienna, too. (loc 1562)

Churchill wanted to carry on the coalition until Japan surrendered. But the Labour Party refused. So he formed a Tory government, had Parliament (which was now ten years old) dissolved, and reluctantly began an election campaign. […]
The next day came the news: Labour had won nearly 400 seats, the Conservatives were reduced to 210 seats, and Churchill was out. (loc 1617)

No man did more to preserve freedom and democracy and the values we hold dear in the West. None provided more public entertainment with his dramatic ups and downs, his noble oratory, his powerful writings and sayings, his flashes of rage, and his sunbeams of wit. (loc 56)

Winston became not merely adept but masterly in his use of words. And he loved them. They became the verbal current coursing through his veins as he shaped his political manhood. No English statesman has ever loved them more or made more persistent use of them to forward his career and redeem it in time of trouble. (loc 151)

Churchill's sheer energy and, not least, his ability to switch it off abruptly when not needed were central keys to his life, and especially his wartime leadership. (loc 1294)

He had a historian's mind, eager to grapple with facts, actualities, to answer the who, how, where, when questions, rather than a philosopher's, mesmerized by abstractions with their whys and wherefores. (loc 265)

"Churchill's greatest intellectual gift was for picking on essentials and concentrating on them." But these essentials were always directed toward the destruction of the enemy. (loc 1401)

The first lesson is: always aim high. […] He got himself into five wars in quick succession and became both a veteran of military lore and one of the world's most experienced (and highly paid) war correspondents. […] He sought power and got it in growing amplitude. He never cadged or demeaned himself to get office, but obtained it on his own terms. (loc 1839)

Lesson number two is: there is no substitute for hard work. He worked hard at everything to the best of his ability: Parliament, administration, geopolitics and geostrategy, writing books, painting, creating an idyllic house and garden, seeing things and if possible doing things for himself. Mistakes he made, constantly, but there was never anything shoddy or idle about his work. He put tremendous energy into everything, and was able to do this because (as he told me) he conserved and husbanded his energy, too. (loc 1850)

Third, and in its way most important, Churchill never allowed mistakes, disaster—personal or national—accidents, illnesses, unpopularity, and criticism to get him down. His powers of recuperation, both in physical illness and in psychological responses to abject failure, were astounding. (loc 1854)

Fourth, Churchill wasted an extraordinarily small amount of his time and emotional energy on the meannesses of life: recrimination, shifting the blame onto others, malice, revenge seeking, dirty tricks, spreading rumors, harboring grudges, waging vendettas. Having fought hard, he washed his hands and went on to the next contest. (loc 1862)

Joy was a frequent visitor to Churchill's psyche, banishing boredom, despair, discomfort, and pain. He liked to share his joy, and give joy. It must never be forgotten that Churchill was happy with people. (loc 1869)

I trade breakouts of classical chart formations such as head and shoulders tops and bottoms, rectangles, channels, triangles, and the like. I focus on weekly and daily chart patterns that form over a period of four weeks to many months. Even though my focus on charts is longer term, my actual trading tends to be short term, with trades lasting anywhere from a day or two (in the case of losses) to a month or two.
…
The Last Day Rule is the principal method used in the Factor Trading Plan to determine the initial protective stop order once a position is entered. If a pattern breakout is valid, then it logically follows that the day of the breakout is a significant event. Ideally, I establish a position at the point of a price breakout and use the low of an upside breakout day or the high of a downside breakout day to set my protective stop levels. This is called the Last Day Rule.
…
The Weekend Rule basically states that a market that decisively moves into new high or low ground on a Friday is very likely to continue the move on Monday and early Tuesday of the next week. The reasoning behind the Weekend Rule is that a decisive new high or low on Friday indicates the willingness of "strong hands" to take a position home for a weekend.
…

It is generally believed that candlestick charts in their earliest form were developed in the 18th century by a legendary Japanese rice trader named Homma Munehisa. Munehisa realized that there was a link between the price of rice and its supply-and-demand factors, but that market price was also driven by the emotions of market participants. The principles behind candlestick charts provided Munehisa a method to graphically view the prices over a period of time and gain an edge over his trading competitors. An edge is all that a speculator can ever expect.
…
There is a huge difference between being short a market because of a chart pattern and being "bearish" on the fundamentals of a market because of the same chart pattern.

This is a relatively insightful point, echoed by Bruce Kovner in Market Wizards. The chart pattern should be used to make a statement on the fundamentals and market sentiment, rather than naively as a trading signal.
…
To be a valid breakout, I also want to see a market penetrate the most recent high or low price that defined the boundary. And to be most comfortable with a trade, I want to see a market penetrate the highest or lowest price within the completed boundary.
…
I greatly prefer to trade a pattern that offers a horizontal or flat boundary, such as the boundaries of a rectangle, ascending triangle, H&S, etc. I consider such patterns to be horizontal. The reason these are superior patterns for trading is that the penetration of a boundary line most often occurs simultaneously with the violation of a major or minor high or low point within the pattern.

There is a more important reason to believe in horizontal boundaries: they represent "levels" at which people are stepping into buy, which based on my own experiences in markets, definitely exist! People do make statements like "I am a buyer of oil below $70", and certainly governments can have implicit or explicit "strikes".
…
As a general rule, genuine H&S tops and bottoms must be characterized by three features:

1. Remembering that an H&S pattern is most often a reversal pattern, there must be a trend to be reversed in order for an H&S interpretation to be valid.
2. The right and left shoulders must overlap—and the more overlap the better. If the right and left shoulders do not overlap, then there is no H&S pattern.
3. There must be some symmetry to the shoulders in terms of duration or height in order to validate an H&S pattern. A final point: I greatly prefer a flat neckline or one that slants in the direction of the anticipated trend. I do not like upslanting necklines in H&S tops or downslanting necklines in H&S bottoms.
   …

It is easy for me to enter a trade, easy to take quick losses on trades that never work, easy to take pyramid trades, and easy to take profits at targets, but enormously difficult to deal with profitable trades that are somewhere between the entry point and the target.
…
There is an overpowering temptation to remain involved with a market that just provided a nice profit. The emotion of greed almost demands an immediate re-entry into the trade lest money be left on the table.
…

We are living an earned life when the choices, risks, and effort we make in each moment align with an overarching purpose in our lives, regardless of the eventual outcome. (loc 411)
…
What we're addressing here is supersized existential regret, the kind that reroutes destinies and persecutes our memory for decades. Existential regret is deciding not to have children, then changing our mind too late. It's allowing our soulmate to become "the one who got away." It's turning down the perfect job because we doubt ourselves far more than do the folks who want to hire us. It's not taking our studies seriously in school. It's looking back in retirement and wishing we'd allowed ourselves more leisure time to develop interests outside work. (loc 330)

ONE OF OUR guiding concepts here is that our lives reside on a continuum that roams between Regret and Fulfillment, (loc 354)

an earned life makes only a few demands of us: Live your own life, not someone else's version of it. Commit yourself to "earning" every day. Make it a habit. Attach your earning moments to something greater than mere personal ambition. (loc 462)

The dig at personal ambition is sort of inconsistent with the rest of this book.

This is the secret of living an earned life: It is lived at the extremes. You are maximizing what you need to do, minimizing what you deem unnecessary. (loc 1333)

I am cautious about this because people's utility functions change. If you maximise based on your present utility function you may live to regret it. However, this approach works if you are constantly course-correcting your goals.
…
Ambition is the pursuit of a specific goal with a finish line; we are X, we want to achieve Y. When we hit Y, our specific ambition ends, until we come up with our next ambitious goal. Aspiration, on the other hand, is a continuing act of self-creation and self-validation. (loc 1499)

Any positive, lasting self-improvement we earn in life derives from Action working in concert with Ambition and Aspiration. (loc 1505)

The most reliable predictor of who you'll be five years from now is who you are now. (loc 791)

Inertia is powerful

Over time, with enough "evidence," our parents subdivide us into distinct personalities: the smart one, pretty one, strong one, nice one, responsible one—whichever of the many descriptors seems to apply at the time. (loc 817)

As the great journalist Herbert Bayard Swope (winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Reporting in 1917) said, "I can't give you a surefire formula for success. But I can give you a formula for failure: Try to please everybody all the time." (loc 842)

Parental influence. Obligation. Mental block. Peer pressure. Not enough time. Inertial devotion to the status quo. These are the perennial barriers that freeze us in place and leave us yearning for a new path yet unable to take the first step on that path. (loc 933)

If you find that you're living the same day every day, you could ask yourself the same question: Am I living my current life because it's how I choose to find fulfillment, or because I can't imagine an alternative? An honest answer is essential, but possibly too painful to bear. (loc 1038)

When we are frustrated with our life or career and yearn for something more gratifying, it may be emotionally soothing to imagine a life that's 180 degrees removed from our current predicament. But the odds of success favor the people who do not stray too far from their expertise, experience, and relationships. (loc 1191)

That doesn't mean we're restricted to small and incremental change in our lives. The change can be huge. But it requires adjacency—some connection, however indirect, to our track record of accomplishment. (loc 1193)

The objective of the Life Plan Review, or LPR, is to close the gap between what you plan to do in your life and what you actually get done. (loc 2506)

Step 1. In the LPR, you and each member of the weekly meeting take turns reporting your answers to a fixed set of six questions that have been documented to improve your life. "Did I do my best to…" Set clear goals? Make progress toward achieving my goals? Find meaning? Be happy? Maintain and build positive relationships? Be fully engaged? You answer each question by reporting a number on a 1 to 10 scale (10 being the best) that measures your level of effort, (loc 2525)

Step 2. In the days between the weekly LPR meetings you track these questions daily—to create the habit of self-monitoring. (loc 2528)

Step 3. Review your plan for relevance and personal need once a week. When you measure effort, you are monitoring the quality of your trying. But from time to time you should also review the purpose of your trying. Are you making a meaningful effort to achieve a now meaningless goal? (loc 2547)

DO THIS: List the twenty or so people in your career with whom you communicate most frequently over, say, a three-month period. Is there one standout skill or personal quality that you share with the listed people whom you most admire? If so, is it the kind of skill that can take you far in a totally different field? That is, does who you want to become match up with who you already are? (loc 1218)

DO THIS: We place our heroes on pedestals too high to reach, rarely considering them as role models to copy. The four steps in this exercise correct that error: Write down the names of your heroes. Write down one-word descriptors of the values and virtues that endear them to you. Cross out their names. Write your name in their place. (loc 1668)

DO THIS: For an extended period of time—a month at least—keep a log of every time someone says something to you that sounds as if they see latent potential that you have been overlooking. It can be specific praise ("That was a good point you made in the meeting. It never occurred to me"). Or an open-ended suggestion ("You should be more assertive"). Or tough love ("Do it over. I expected better from you"). (loc 2088)

FEEDFORWARD "Feedforward" is a word I started using after a conversation with John Katzenbach when I began coaching CEOs. It was my counterpoint to "feedback," the more common term for an exchange of workplace opinion. Whereas feedback comprises people's opinion of your past behavior, feedforward represents other people's ideas that you should be using in the future.
[…]
After you pick the one behavior you intend to change, make your intention known in a one-on-one conversation with someone you know. Ask that person—it could be anyone, not necessarily a co-worker—for two suggestions that might help you achieve your goal. Listen without judgment, then say "Thank you." (loc 2355)

Write Your History of Help Here is an exercise in recovered memory and humility. DO THIS: Make a list of your five to ten proudest achievements, particularly the ones where the accomplishment felt well deserved. Now imagine you were invited to receive an award for each achievement and you were expected to give a thank-you speech in front of all your relatives, colleagues, and friends. Whom would you thank? And why? (loc 2940)

Being motivated is not merely a supercharged emotional state induced by having a goal. It is that heightened emotional state coupled with a supercharged impulse to do each of the specific tasks required to achieve that goal. It is incorrect to say that you are motivated to make money or lose weight or become fluent in Mandarin, even if you feel such statements are true, unless you consistently do the big and small things required to achieve such goals. (loc 1010)

That's the beauty of confidence. It is the product of all your other positive virtues and choices, and then it returns the favor by making you even stronger in those areas. As a general rule, if you have motivation, ability, and understanding, lacking confidence is unfortunate, almost inexcusable. You have earned the right to be confident. (loc 1101)

Within a short time he developed a methodology that measured what he called Talent to Value. Analyzing Unilever's three hundred thousand employees through a proprietary formula, he concluded that just fifty-six people at Unilever were responsible for 90 percent of its value. […] These people, Sandy also learned, were invariably specialists—and their value was embedded in that term: They were "special." Pay them whatever it takes to keep them, he said. (loc 1956)

Do not confuse "one-trick genius" with the pejorative "one-trick pony." The term "one-trick pony" is judgmental and denigrating, referring to people who abuse a limited skill set—whether it's the same predictable response to every situation or one slick move on the basketball court—because they have no choice. It's all they've got. OTG, by contrast, is a deeply considered choice, representing what we aspire to rather than what we settle for. (loc 1990)

At first glance, CEOs appear to be the ultimate generalists. But peel away the necessary but generalized leadership skills of clear communication, persuasion, and decision making, and you'll find that every good CEO has a very specific skill or core value that they regard as their OTG. One CEO's OTG might be running a productive meeting; another's might be creating total alignment at every level of the organization. The genius in each CEO's trick is that this isolated skill is the foundation of the CEO's credibility and respect; it governs everything. (loc 2027)

I believe our problem with approval, like our problem with asking for help, starts at the top. My experience with successful leaders is that they're sensitive to employees' need for approval and recognition and are very adept at providing it. But for the same reasons they won't admit they need help, they're reluctant to acknowledge their own need for approval or recognition. A leader's internal sense of validation—i.e., self-approval—should be enough, they tell themselves. Anything else is grandstanding, the equivalent of turning on the Applause sign for yourself. Net result: the CEO's attitude filters down the line until approval and recognition are denied their rightful place throughout the organization. (loc 2860)

This is a valuable point. Characteristics that I think are good in myself may not be good if they percolate to people around me.

I prefer to apply his WYSIATI in a more positive light, as a reminder that every set of facts we see is situational—and there's something noble in dealing as best we can with what's in front of us. (loc 3093)

One of the more common excuses is a variation on the well-known concept of loss aversion—our impulse to avoid a loss is greater than our desire to acquire an equivalent gain. We are willing to pay the price when there's a high probability that our efforts will achieve success, far less eager when the probability is low. (loc 3158)

Although the study's implied learning—delayed gratification is unilaterally good—is hard to ignore, imagine if the study was extended beyond the second marshmallow. After waiting the required minutes, the child was given a second marshmallow but told, "If you wait a little longer, you will get a third marshmallow!" And a fourth marshmallow…a fifth marshmallow…a hundredth marshmallow. […]
Know that there are times when you should eat the marshmallow. (loc 3238)

What if the number of marshmallows is increasing quadratically or exponentially? In my view that's a better model of self-improvement.

I joined the party circuit for the world's "Very Important People" to understand what they do with their huge and growing pools of disposable income, and how they think about wastefully destroying their money—a phenomenon that, to outsiders, often seems ridiculous and disgusting. From 2011 to 2013, I documented a ritualized form of wealth destruction in the elite club scene, one that repeats around the world, from the Hamptons to Saint-Tropez, but one that does not come easy. It takes an incredible amount of labor to enable conspicuous leisure, and this labor upholds a gendered economy of value in which women's bodies are assessed against men's money. (loc 104)

While the VIP club space extracted value from women's beauty, women suspected of using their looks for their own economic gain were shunned. Club owners, promoters, and wealthy clients all shared suspicions around women who seemed to have economic motivations. (loc 2269)

Sexuality has always had asymmetrical consequences for men and women. Men gain status and respect with their sexual conquests, while promiscuity ruins a woman's respectability. Girls may have abundant riches in the form of bodily capital, but their capacity to spend it is limited by gendered rules of sexual conduct. (loc 2343)

girls had a powerful asset in the form of bodily capital that gave them access to the VIP world, but it was worth far more to men, for whom girls functioned as a valuable currency, a resource we might call girl capital. (loc 2480)

In the nightlife business, Dre is known as an image promoter. This means he works freelance, contracting with multiple nightclubs and restaurants throughout the city to bring in a so-called "quality crowd," understood to consist of attractive women, rich men, celebrities, and other well-connected people. (loc 167)

Dre knew that his work was disreputable, but it was lucrative. He was making over $200,000 a year. Though his income paled in comparison to those of the rich men around him at night, he was confident that the gap would shrink. Working alongside this segment of the new global elite, he believed, would enable him to one day become one of them. (loc 177)

In essence, the promoter's job is to stage a show of two types of power—wealth and beauty—embodied in the form of rich men and girls, respectively. (loc 374)

Promoters typically began their career as subs, making $50 per girl that they bring out, or about $100–200 per night. (loc 910)

Since every high-end club hires a handful of image promoters each night, this creates serious competition for any given promoter to find models, befriend them, and get them to come out night after night. If promoters get it wrong—if their girls are not beautiful enough or are too few in number—they'll get reprimanded by club managers. They could even get fired. (loc 411)

Promoters were crucial to putting these dreamworlds together, and they were heavily invested in the belief that they too fully belonged in them. For all of their dreaming, promoters remain mostly shut out of the elite. (loc 749)

Promoters could mobilize their sex appeal to build ties with girls, which were then convertible into social capital among elite networks. But even with a formidable amount of ties to elites, few promoters were able to leverage the value of their networks in the ways they could see happening for the elite men around them. (loc 3991)

In the various earlier manifestations of New York City's nightclub scenes—be it the discotheques in the 1970s or the legendary downtown dance clubs of the mid-1990s like Palladium or Tunnel—the rules were basically the same. After paying a cover charge, all visitors shared the same space with anyone else who had $20 in their pocket that night, and everyone jostled together to get an overpriced drink at the bar. (loc 250)

Bring me back to London clubs!!

amid this surge of wealth, club owners began to approach their spaces like real estate. With increasing rents, operating a huge club on door and drink prices couldn't turn a profit like it used to. The dance floor and the crowded area by the bar remained the same, open to whoever was willing to pay the cover charge and high drinks prices. But the real profits of a club now came from individual tables, which club owners started to "rent" to people with money, who would pay for the right to occupy one for a few hours. (loc 287)

With demanding work schedules in industries like finance, the working rich in the United States now work more hours and spend less time on leisure than Veblen's leisure class. (loc 351)

Most clubs make the bulk of their profits from smaller and more reliable table bills, the $1,500 to $3,000 sums spent by groups of affluent tourists and businessmen—your run-of-the-mill banker, tech developer, or other upper-class professional with a disposable income. (loc 559)

At the bottom of the hierarchy is a category of men without connections or money who cannot afford even modest table rents, but they might still have something of value to offer the club. Called "fillers," these men keep the place from looking empty. (loc 575)

That's me!

Franz Boas, the pioneer of modern American anthropology, was among the first ethnographers to document wasting rituals, in late-nineteenth-century tribes along the Pacific Northwest Coast in what is now Canada. With his key informant George Hunt, Boas depicted competitive gifting and feasting rituals called potlatches. In a potlatch, a tribal chief or noble lavished gifts of considerable riches upon his guests to advance his title or rank, doling out large quantities of food, woolen blankets, or silver bracelets. Potlatch ceremonies often began as a feast and culminated in a fire, sometimes with the outright destruction of property, like tossing blankets into a fire, breaking canoes, or throwing heirloom coppers into the ocean. (loc 1267)

Potlatch is about rank. It can be playful and transgressive, but it is always rooted in systems of prestige and power. (loc 1286)

the VIP circuit demonstrates a historically significant moment, a form of status acquisition made possible by the conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism. (loc 4049)

Money is only a means to status. It can buy prestige through philanthropy. It can buy high-status objects like artworks and fine wines to impress visitors. Money can buy your residence in an affluent neighborhood and your children's place in the right school. The sum total of all of these efforts creates valuable "cultural capital," what French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu identified as the mastery of upper-class cultural codes. (loc 4082)

Economists have called the rise of luxury consumption "luxury fever," a ratcheting upward of price-driven distinction resulting in an arms race for positional, or status-affirming goods. These dynamics drive new markets for high-status objects like artworks and fine wines, which French theorists Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre call "exceptional objects," things that are sold by the rich to the rich and are valued mostly for the fact of their expensiveness. (loc 4103)

VIP clubs have to enable the potlatch to unfold in a way that suspends the deliberateness of status-seeking, primarily by making it seem spontaneous and playful. It takes an enormous amount of labor to pull off a successful potlatch performance. Like any organized social form, the potlatch is a collective ritual that unfolds in carefully scripted situations; it is constituted by a shared culture of excess and the collective valorization of waste. (loc 4121)

For sites designed for the display and squander of money, VIP clubs undertake elaborate efforts to conceal economic exchanges. Money is front and center in the champagne potlatch, yet it is also carefully hidden in the relations between clients, clubs, promoters, and girls. Direct monetary exchanges between these groups is taboo. For clients, clubs afford them the chance to act out domination over each other and over girls' bodies, without the taboo that comes with hiring women directly, (loc 4190)

"What's the most important ingredient, the biggest ingredient in a salad? Lettuce. That's our affluent New Yorkers, guys with small bills of three to five thousand." (loc 1433)

These men, all of whom could be described as "working rich," even when they came from wealthy families, voiced clear justifications for their own large bills in clubs. They minimized their own expenditures by drawing symbolic boundaries between themselves and other clients. In the VIP arena, where vast financial resources are on display, even the biggest spenders could see their purchases as relatively modest. There is always someone spending more, given the extent to which the world's wealth is concentrated in the hands of men like the whales. (loc 1607)

Several clients explained that this is the nature of wealth in a city like New York, where their own riches might seem paltry compared to those of someone else in the same room. As the sociologist Rachel Sherman similarly noted, this is a common discursive strategy through which wealthy New Yorkers minimize their material privilege in order to feel more comfortable with their own economic superiority. (loc 1611)

Jonas and Donald had strategic goals that the right kinds of girls could help them achieve. Girls got them invited to Lou's parties, and they opened the door for business talk—for Jonas, about yacht rentals, and for Donald, about private-equity investments. For these men, girls functioned as decor in two senses of the word: they were an embellishment that made the men look better than they were; they were also a mark of honor, a status signifier that caught the attention of other men. (loc 1956)

In paying for wildly inflated prices on alcohol, clients buy the invisibility of the labor it took to bring girls to them; they pay to not have to bring girls themselves, or to pay a broker outright to procure girls. They are buying, in part, the illusion of spontaneity. (loc 4194)

Risk is something you dial up or down in order to accomplish a goal. It is neither good nor bad in itself. This is the sense in which I always use the word risk in this book. Compare this to the "risk" of a basketball player getting injured. I will use the word danger for this, not risk. Dangers should be minimized, subject to constraints. For example, we don't want to require so much protective padding that a game is not fun, or the cost is too great. So we don't try to set danger of injury to zero, but we also don't "manage" it; we never increase it for its own sake.
The counterpart to a danger on the good side is an "opportunity," such as the opportunity for a pitcher in baseball to get a no-hitter. This is considered so valuable that a manager will almost always leave a pitcher with a chance at a no-hitter in the game, even if he is tiring and a relief pitcher would increase the probability of winning the game. (loc 257)

Frank Knight, for example, made a distinction between risk, with known probabilities and outcomes, and uncertainty, which is something akin to our dangers and opportunities. But he did this to emphasize the limits of mathematics in decision making under uncertainty. He did not appreciate the power of quantitative methods for separating risk from uncertainty, nor the tremendous benefit from applying mathematics to optimize risk taking. (loc 315)

When economists consider risk, they usually assume that the types of stakes don't matter—gambling for money is no different from gambling for anything else of value. That turns out not to be true. Optimizing requires goals and constraints. Optimizing risk requires that the two be interchangeable. One way that can happen is if both are measured in money. It also turns out that any time you set up a risk-taking activity with the same units used for goals and constraints, you create a form of money. (loc 401)

Suppose I observe that you will bet one apple against one orange on some event. I don't know what probability you assign to the event, because I can't divide apples by oranges. But then suppose I see you trade one apple for two oranges. Now I know you were giving two to one odds, meaning you think the event has at least two chances in three of occurring. I have separated your decisions into preferences—how much you like apples versus oranges—and beliefs—how likely you think the event is. This is the basic separation required for the modern idea of rationality, the assumption underlying most modern economic utility theory. It depends crucially on both gambling and exchange—on randomness and money. (loc 473)

However, there are many different distributions and utility functions that are equally good at explaining brain activity and behavior for individual decisions, and no distribution and utility function that explains all decisions, even for one individual at one time. Intelligent risk management has to begin with a numeraire, plus the awareness that the numeraire does not cover all possible outcomes of the decision. (loc 484)

In textbooks, you can then arrange all the little risks in carefully calibrated sizes in an optimal order to maximize your expected utility. In reality, with real risk, you have to make a series of decisions without knowing exactly what the future risks will be, what all the possible outcomes are, what the probability of winning is, or how you'll feel about things after the results are in. (loc 1930)

I describe myself as a "quant" with a lowercase q, unpretentious as in, "just a simple quant." I'm not humble, as you'll figure out if you keep reading, but I'm not given to overstatement. What I do isn't rocket science, most of it is trivially simple and the rest is more meticulous care than brilliance. But to be historically accurate, we're stuck with the term, and it does convey some of the spirit of the group. We contrasted ourselves to people we called "Einsteins," an even stupider name. We had nothing against Albert Einstein, but we disagreed with people who thought risk was deeply complex and could be figured out by pure brainpower, without actually taking any risk or observing any risk takers. "Einstein" was rarely used as a noun. It was more common as an adjective. "He had a good insight, but went Einstein with it," (loc 328)

The only way you got VaR accepted on the trading floor in the early 1990s was to bet; you can imagine what traders think of a risk manager who tells them how to run their billion-dollar portfolios but won't risk $10,000 of his own money on his analysis. (loc 730)

The problem is that the field of probability was not discovered; rather, it was created by the confusion of two concepts. The first is the frequency with which certain events recur, such as the number of times out of 100 throws a coin will come up heads. The second is the degree of belief to attach to a proposition, such as how likely it is that France will win the next World Cup.
the effort to make statistics fully rigorous was completed only around 1960. Until then, the natural thought was that when we got to the bottom of things, the relationship between frequency and belief would become obvious. Instead, we had fully consistent theories of both, with no significant overlap, and no paths for further inquiry. (loc 1212)

Risk was a fusion of observed frequencies and belief formation, and both the observation and the psychology were a lot more complex than most people realized. They required new empirical work to understand them. (loc 1217)

One camp gravitated toward blackjack card counting and other advantage gambling (playing standard casino games in a way that the odds favor the player instead of the house). These people are frequentists. Advantage gamblers were apt to sneer at the rest of us, calling us hustlers who conned people.
Another group diverged in the opposite direction. The invention of the point spread and the unrestrained growth of organized crime had turned sports betting from the domain of local bookies, who took risk but might lay off a large imbalance through an informal network, to a highly organized, mostly illegal, national business that was allergic to risk. It was easy for quants to identify profitable bet opportunities in this system, because the spreads were set to equalize money bet on both sides, not to reflect the true probability of winning.
These guys were Bayesians, degree-of-belief believers. A sporting event cannot be repeated. The line will be set by the public's beliefs about the outcome or, more precisely, by the organization's and insiders' predictions about the public's beliefs. (loc 1292)

From a frequentist point of view, suppose someone tells you he rejects the hypothesis that it will snow in New York City tomorrow at the 5 percent level. He can say this every day with perfect accuracy, since it snows in New York City on fewer than 5 percent of days. But the statement is useless for practical decision making. Some days have essentially zero chance of snow; on other days snow is virtually certain. (loc 512)

It is not the significance level that tells you the reliability of a frequentist statistical claim; it is the vigor and sincerity of the falsification efforts undertaken in measuring the significance. (loc 526)

When a frequentist rejects a hypothesis at the 5 percent level, that does not mean the negation of the hypothesis has a 95 percent chance of being true. It's possible to have a set of mutually exclusive hypotheses, all of which can be individually rejected at the 5 percent level. (loc 558)

In practice, Bayesians often find they have to resort to "improper priors" in which probabilities do not add up to one or choose probabilities for mathematical convenience rather than subjective belief. Bayesians who refuse to do this on principle must live in ivory towers, because they cannot tackle real decision problems. (loc 554)

One issue with this is none of the prices directly measure probability; all of them blend in utility to some degree. A person who locks in a price for future oil may not believe the price of oil is going up. (loc 535)

we rejected the idea of a fully defined probability distribution that covered all possible future events. Our probability distributions might cover 95 percent or 99 percent of possible events, but would leave 5 percent or 1 percent as undefined outcomes, states of the world in which money was worthless, or in which outcomes were dominated by considerations that could not be priced.
Since no numeraire is perfect, we need to separate out the dangers and opportunities that cannot be measured in the money we are using for the probability calculation. (loc 449)

we made the empirical discovery that estimating the sum of the probabilities you could define reliably was highly illuminating, often a more valuable quantity to know than the statistic you were estimating in the first place. (loc 549)

Ars Conjectandi contained the first proof of the law of large numbers, which says that you can get results to conform as closely as you want to average by repeating the experiment enough times. This tied mathematical computation to long-run frequency, but gave no reason to tie long-run frequency—whether observed in the past or computed according to a theory—to a specific one-time decision about an unknown future event. (loc 5467)

we can use market observation of underlying stock and option prices to estimate the risk-neutral distribution of underlying stock returns, and price any derivative at its expected value under the risk-neutral distribution. The risk-neutral distribution is distinct from the actual probability distribution. For one example, we know investors pay more for returns in bad states of the world than in good states. This means the risk-neutral probability distribution has higher probability values on market crashes than their actual chance of occurring. (loc 5590)

Because people overpay for insurance, the price-derived probability ("risk neutral") sees disaster cases as more probable.

most quantitative people focus on the house edge, the fraction of each dollar bet the casino gets on average. But a casino cares about something different: the hold, the fraction of chips customers buy that the casino ends up winning. The hold depends on the edge, of course, but also on betting speed and bettor behavior. Casinos offer games with wide variation of edge, but strikingly similar holds (with some adjustment for the cost of offering the game). (loc 765)

If the hold is too big, customers buy fewer chips, and eventually stop coming. There is an optimal level of hold that makes the casino's business the most valuable: low enough for high volume and growth, high enough to make a profit. For most commercial gambling operations, the problem is that the hold is too big. That's why casinos give customers back about 75 percent of their losses in the form of free or discounted services, (loc 769)

in my line change strategy in sports betting, the first thing I noticed was that line changes early in the week were usually news and were underreactions so the smart play was to bet with them, whereas changes Friday evening and later were usually driven by uninformed bettors altering the supply and demand. Those changes were good to bet against. Similarly, with gasoline crack spreads, momentum might work best certain times of year, or in certain situations. (loc 3062)

Principle I: Risk Duality
The first principle of modern quantitative risk management is to split the analysis into two parts. For normal, common events you have plenty of data to make reliable quantitative conclusions using historical statistics. But long-term success requires at least surviving the abnormal, unexpected, uncommon events you know will also occur. The greatest long-term success requires exploiting—not just surviving—them. So you need to take them into account as well. You must manage them even though you don't know what might happen, you don't know how your actions will influence what might happen, and you certainly can't assign probabilities. (loc 687)

Principle II: Valuable Boundary
The next principle to be discovered was a complete surprise. We had assumed it would be pretty easy to define the region in which you had plenty of data—in other words, how much things could vary and still be considered normal. After all, you have plenty of data there, by definition.
Setting VaR seems like a reasonably easy statistics problem, but it's not. You have to quote the number every day before trading begins, even when there are data problems, and VaR is never adjusted later. (loc 724)

One major result is we learned how little we had understood about the risk in the well-behaved center of the probability distribution on normal trading days. We had thought all our risk problems were in the tails of the distribution or on abnormal days. There was another surprise, pleasant rather than unpleasant. It turned out that changes in portfolio VaR, once you got a good VaR system, were extremely useful information for both making money and managing risk. VaR breaks were equally useful, as signals that something had changed. (loc 732)

The general risk management principle is to define ahead of time the set of outcomes for which you have confidence in probability estimates (usually because you have plenty of data, but possibly because you trust a theory) and, crucially, how often you will get an outcome outside that set. The effort to create this system will teach you a lot; especially it will teach you how little you knew before making the attempt to predict and validating that attempt rigorously. In my experience, any change in the set boundary will prove to be a useful input to decisions. When you get an outcome outside the set, it will be a useful alert that something is changing. (loc 748)

The secret to managing risk outside the VaR boundary is to make sure it is good risk, and to set up the right structure of decision making. That means we have to jettison utility theory, at least in its simplest form, because it teaches that all risk is bad. (loc 942)

Principle III: Risk Ignition
The third principle of modern quantitative risk management was an antisurprise, which we called "risk ignition." This is an idea that traces back to John Kelly—who we met briefly in Chapter 1—in 1956. He discovered that if you take an optimal amount of risk—not more and not less—you can be certain of exponentially growing success, which will always leave you better off than any other strategy. Instead of gains and losses bobbing you up and down, you can take off like a rocket to astronomical success. (loc 753)

quants had been trying to ignite risk for years, and it always seemed to fail. Only when we learned to set a VaR limit and make provisions for events outside it could strategies survive long enough to benefit from ignition. Before this discovery, hedge funds had been around since 1949. Most of them had failed, but the successful ones had made their owners moderately wealthy. Suddenly we got a slew of hedge fund billionaires, and we produced a few new ones every year since. (loc 804)

Principle IV: Money
In conventional analysis of risk, you can gamble for any stakes, monetary or nonmonetary. The study of risk is unrelated to the study of money. But as we saw in Chapter 1, the two are intimately linked. You can't ignite risk without money and you can't understand money without understanding risk. (loc 812)

Principle V: Evolution
What are some examples of good risk? Evolution, for one. Random variation leads to more wonderful creations than anything any human ever designed on purpose. (loc 945)

Conventional economic reasoning says that if two stocks have similar expected future cash flows and similar dependence on the market, we prefer the one that is less volatile. But might we not see some advantage to stock in volatile company A, which has survived many crises, over stock in safe, untested company B? Perhaps A's stresses have allowed evolution of the characteristics that will succeed in the future, whereas B is narrowly positioned for the conditions of the past. (loc 980)

He got to antifragility before Taleb!

Principle VI: Superposition
If everything is priced in money, marked to market and subject to liquid trading, you get a narrowly efficient result. Because the result is highly specialized to a set of prices and uniform throughout the economy, even a small change in prices can cause a large dislocation. In a less integrated and controlled economy, lots of innovation will be sparked by people encountering overlooked and underpriced assets, and by other people facing unusual price structures. A lot of this activity will represent waste, but it does mean that when prices change there will be economic players positioned to take advantage

Principle VII: Game Theory
a legislator or judge can do a better job if she deals only with general principles without knowing in advance the precise effects of laws or decisions. That is why justice is blind: she hears only the facts of the case; she does not see anything else to make her prefer plaintiff or defendant. Her decision is to be based on principles, not predictions of effects. (loc 1052)

Game theory should influence thinking about risk in a different way than evolution and quantum physics did. Game theory reverses the causality. Instead of risk arising in nature and analysts trying to make predictions in spite of it, risk is something deliberately created by people or implicitly created by social systems for useful purposes. It's the difference between lightning and the electricity that comes through a wire to light your home. They obey the same physical laws, but for most practical purposes are unrelated phenomena. (loc 1060)

A financial example of the fallacy of confusing game theory randomness with coin flip randomness is Black Wednesday. Instead of treating the exchange rate as a random walk, the British Treasury should have considered it as a bet. In order to win the contest, it had to be able to create a credible scenario in which speculators would have been hurt if they had failed. In the circumstances that may not have been possible, in which case the Treasury could have saved a lot of money and pride by bowing to the inevitable. (loc 1089)

Strong action is useless if everyone knows it represents the limit of your strength. (loc 1094)

For Harry, the key was diversification. You didn't put all your money in one stock because you should use money to buy lots of other stocks. For Kelly, the key was bet sizing. You shouldn't put all your money in one stock because it is overbetting. It didn't matter whether there were other stocks to invest in or not. Harry said not to put all your money in one stock because there are simultaneous investment opportunities. Kelly said not to put all your money in one stock because there are future betting opportunities. (loc 1494)

In the real world, Markowitz created modern portfolio theory (MPT). It holds that investors care about the statistical properties of their portfolios and act to maximize expected return subject to a risk constraint. Expected return is good, risk is bad, and the investor balances the two. A Kelly-inspired analogue might have been called investment growth theory (IGT). The claim would be that investors select a portfolio for optimal long-term growth. Investors care about investments, not portfolios, and determine how much to allocate to each based on expected return and variance. There are portfolio effects; your capital allocation decision on each investment depends on your past decisions, but these are pretty small in practice unless you are considering highly correlated assets. In the IGT world, we would expect an investor to analyze investment opportunities one at a time. Each acceptable investment would be assigned an investment amount, a lot for the most attractive and lowest-risk opportunities, less for either marginally attractive or high-risk opportunities, (loc 1631)

IGT is bottom-up. An investor considers investments, makes an allocation decision, and then moves on to the next decision. The portfolio is what results from this process. (loc 1650)

IGT also seems to be a better description of investor thought processes. Investors focus on how much capital is at risk in a position, what the expected return is, and how much variance of return can be expected. These are the three most important parameters in Kelly investing. MPT suggested that the most important question was correlation among investments, which was pretty far down on an investor's list of concerns—at least it was before Harry. (loc 1656)

Harry also said that standard deviation mattered, not variance. Although the two might seem to be the same (standard deviation is the square root of variance), they differ in one key respect. In order to compare standard deviation to expected return, you have to specify a time horizon, whereas variance and expected return have the same ratio at any time horizon. MPT is a one-period theory; you pick the best portfolio, and then at the end of the period you trade it in for the portfolio optimized for the next period. IGT is a dynamic theory without a fixed time horizon; (loc 1659)

The IGT CAPM is here to demonstrate that the MPT CAPM can become a rut that prevents its students from seeing that there are rational, even reasonable, alternatives to the MPT CAPM worldview. (loc 1703)

Money is even less important in abnormal times. If you are thirsty in a desert, the price of water does not have much meaning. If there is a financial liquidity crisis, the money value of your levered investment is equally irrelevant. (loc 825)

Money measures constraints and goals in the same units, meaning that partial successes in the goal reduce constraints on future activity. The more you win, the more you can bet. (loc 844)

Also, money captures the value of any degree of success. We will see later that those are precisely the two things that make risk ignition possible. We'll also see that those two things are essential for the creation of true money, defined as a single instrument that simultaneously functions as a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a numeraire or standard of value. (loc 846)

Paper money is created by some institution that we will call a "bank." This institution does not need reserves of gold and silver. It does need to make loans. It does not lend precious metal; it lends pieces of paper. The borrowers exchange those pieces of paper for goods and services for their business. Then they sell the products of their business for paper, and use that to repay the loan with interest. The use of physical paper is not important; it is merely a record-keeping device.
There is an obvious vulnerability to the system: what if people lose confidence in the paper money? That can happen for a number of reasons. For example, people could notice borrowers having trouble repaying their loans; demand for money in general could decline; or another institution could fail, causing a panic. Sometimes it happens for no reason at all. The bank can try to reassure the public. It can hold a lot of reserve capital to cover losses; it can make only sound, short-term loans on liquid collateral; it can offer to sell gold and silver for its paper money. But these are optional reassurances only; none are fundamental economic functions of a money creator. (loc 2521)

The biggest misunderstanding about paper money is the idea that it is a promise for gold or silver, and that it serves the same function as precious metal coins. It's an entirely different thing. Rules requiring it to relate to gold and silver are passed in order to destroy true paper money, to turn it into a mere token or a convenient substitute when precious metal is in short supply. (loc 2566)

Each type of paper money has its own interest rate, which is measured by both the interest the bank pays on deposits (if any) and the discount at which the money is accepted (if any). This is a new type of price signal, absent from precious metal. Also, there are exchange rates for different paper monies, another important new signal. (loc 2576)

Someone would decide he wanted to build or buy a power plant. He wouldn't go to a bank or venture capital fund for the money; he'd go to a derivatives dealer. Our entrepreneur would enter into a contract to receive 10 years of oil supplies to power the plant, plus another contract to sell 10 years of electricity generated by the plant—when these two swaps are combined they are called a "tolling" swap. Since the value of the electricity exceeds the value of oil, he receives cash up front. He uses the cash to buy or build the plant, and to pay other bills like wages and maintenance. At the end of the 10 years, he owns the plant free and clear, his reward for putting the deal together and overseeing successful operation for a decade. If he has failed to operate the plant successfully, he wouldn't be able to deliver the promised electricity, and the plant would be seized by his derivatives counterparty. You might object that there is cash involved in this deal: cash to buy the plant, cash to pay wages, and other expenses. But this is more of an accounting entry than real cash. The deal is structured so cash is spent as soon as it becomes available. Cash plays no essential part in the business or its financing. (loc 3331)

Derivative money

the fundamental value is that the money can be used to pay taxes. Just as a government can issue revenue-anticipation bonds to be repaid when taxes come in, it can spend paper money that will have value because people need it to pay taxes.
Despite the large amount of currency held for transactional reasons and to store value, the basic tax value is still important. If faith in the ability or willingness of the government to raise enough taxes to cover its expenditures and debt erodes, the money will be accepted only at a discount, which we call inflation. (loc 3436)

While studies differed depending on the market studied and the amount of data available, a typical study might show that prices were efficient within 0.1 percent. That's pretty impressive accuracy, given the volatility of security prices and the uncertainty of the future. But there are on the order of $100 trillion of securities to purchase, so 0.1 percent is $100 billion. That might not be enough to change your fundamental theory of economics, but it's enough to be worth trying to get. (loc 2861)

The market is efficient within error, but that error is very lucrative!

A crucial point in interpreting tests of efficient markets theory was described by Eugene Fama, known as the father of efficient markets: "Every test of market efficiency is a joint test of market efficiency and market equilibrium." (loc 2932)

It was the frequentists, the blackjack card counters, who adopted the idea that markets are inefficient, but always in equilibrium. Prices can be wrong in an economic sense, too high or too low, but you can buy or sell as much as you want at the posted price. In that case, you make money by computing the correct price for securities. You don't worry who is on the other side of the transaction. You're transacting with some abstract thing called the "market," just as an advantage gambler is playing against the "house,"
Your job is to teach the market, not to learn from it. Although you profit from market inefficiency, you hate it. That's a deep emotional response. You don't want to live in a universe of messy error; you want to live in one of clean, perfect mathematical beauty. Since you don't, all you can do is try to create a more perfect universe. In addition, you have the practical consideration that when the market gets more inefficient you lose money, and when it gets more efficient you make money. (loc 2946)

The card counters have faith in the market, and fear the actions of people. The sports bettors are relying on the predictable actions of people to move the spread a certain way, and fear the market forces that might disrupt historical patterns. (loc 3023)

There's no practical way to know which pieces have been fully incorporated into the price, and which ones have not. However, on a statistical basis, it's usually a good bet that the average bit of news has not been fully incorporated. Therefore, if the net direction of the crack spread over the last month has been up, there has been more good news than bad, so it's more likely than not that there is net positive information—information that should push the price up—not yet incorporated into the price. (loc 3055)

You don't need a Sharpe ratio near or at 1 to get rich. For a Kelly investor, the long-term growth of capital above the risk-free rate is approximately equal to the Sharpe ratio squared (loc 3150)

The sports-betting types preferred the low Sharpe ratio strategies. They would have liked higher Sharpes, of course, but by accepting low Sharpes they could find plenty of opportunities with other desirable characteristics. They could use simple strategies with liquid securities, for which there was constant large capacity for bets. They could have more strategies, and each strategy could bet more frequently, and each strategy could be individually more amenable to risk management. This kind of investing is what some people now call "quant," (loc 3178)

The trouble is that combining lots of low Sharpe ratio strategies gives you a high Sharpe ratio strategy, at least if the strategy results are not highly correlated with each other. While you are not risking much of your capital on any one bet, if a lot of bets go against you at once, you're in trouble just like an overbetting high Sharpe ratio investor. (loc 3183)

The other problem is that these strategies require cooperation of many people. The growth rate is slow and the capacity is large, so it makes sense to raise outside money and take a fee rather than investing your own money. The strategies require a lot of leverage, and dealing in large size with major brokers. In these circumstances, your fate is not entirely in your hands. You may have to cut positions at the wrong time, or even close up business entirely, (loc 3189)

In the end, none of it made any difference. All of us were wiped out on October 19, 1987. That was the day the stock market fell nearly 25 percent, (loc 3198)

The Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA) issued securities backed by 30-year fixed-rate home mortgages issued under Veterans Administration or Federal Housing Authority programs. These were backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, which in those days was considered as low-risk as you could get. These securities paid significantly higher interest rates than government Treasury bonds. Part of the reason for the additional yield spread was that Treasury bonds are redeemed at a fixed, known maturity. GNMAs were redeemed as homeowners repaid their mortgages (or defaulted on them, in which case the security holder was paid from proceeds of the foreclosure sale or by the government). Mortgages paid off on average in about seven years, one way or the other. Some people pay off their mortgages early because times are good, but most of the repayments occur when someone moves or refinances a home. The problem for the security holder was not just uncertainty. There was adverse selection. If interest rates went down, lots of people would refinance at the lower rates, and the security holders would get back money they had to reinvest at the new lower rates. (loc 3078)

Prepayment risk was much too small to justify the yield difference. It was possible to trade GNMAs actively, along with bond futures and options, to lock in highly predictable profits. (loc 3088)

One of the things I was doing at the time was running such an active GNMA portfolio. But along with a lot of other people, I saw that the real opportunity was to issue securities that mimicked the strategy. (loc 3094)

Suppose instead you could divide the cash flows from the GNMAs in a clever way to back a number of different securities with limited prepayment risk. Some investors like certainty, and would accept a yield a few basis points above Treasuries to get highly predictable cash flows. Some of them want the cash flows soon, whereas others want the money put to work for longer periods of time. Other investors don't care when they get their money back as long as they make a good return. It was possible to set up rules for distributing cash that kept all these people happy. You made the same 4 percent per year, but you could keep 80 percent instead of 20 percent. (loc 3099)

Salomon Brothers issued the first collateralized mortgage obligation, as these new securities were called, and was the largest issuer for many years. (loc 3113)

Salomon Brothers divided the cash flows in time sequence, sending the early cash flows to one security; when that was paid off, cash flowed to the next security in line, and so forth. My first design gave only scheduled principal and interest to the early-maturity tranches, and sent all prepayments to the longest-maturity tranche. I still maintain this was a much better design and should have dominated the market. (loc 3116)

the most momentous decision, which seemed innocuous at the time, was to promise banks capital relief for spending all the money to create Basel II systems. It was clear from the start that only the most sophisticated banks would be able to compute Basel II capital, so simpler options were offered for other banks. The "advanced approach" banks had to be rewarded to give them an incentive to make the investment, and the obvious reward was lower capital requirements. After all, if they managed risk better, they should be allowed to hold less capital. This deal was never written down, as far as I know, but it was accepted as a working agreement by everyone involved in the project. (loc 6025)

The primary cause of every securitization disaster, and there were many prior to 2007, is always failure to sell the entire deal in true arm's-length transactions. (loc 6128)

An even sillier accusation is that Wall Streeters took excessive risks because they got rich if they won and didn't care if the firm failed if they lost. The largest shareholders in all Wall Street firms were the employees. (loc 6190)

When quants like me got into this game, we naturally did one more thing. We kept very careful records of everyone's bets. We figured out whether people were betting the right size. It turned out that even the best traders were bad at that. They bet more when they were wrong than when they were right. (loc 3820)

In practice, it very often seems to be true that the two are not closely related. The trader can pick a performance ratio, the market gives the accuracy ratio. Attempting to increase the accuracy ratio by sacrificing performance ratio seldom works. Therefore, the usual advice is to target a specific performance ratio, adjusting your trading if necessary to get to that target, but only to monitor accuracy ratio. When accuracy ratio is high, bet bigger, when it's low, bet smaller or even stop trading until the market improves for your strategy. (loc 3877)

Speaks to the importance of trade structuring.

Given that humans demonstrably cannot manage simple virtual systems with complete information and power, plus lots of training and practice, you would have to be a complete idiot to expect them to manage complex real systems with noisy and out-of-date information and strictly limited power, and with no training or practice. (loc 4312)

I was always midway between the frequentist and Bayesian camps. People who think like me call ourselves data analysts, and we like nonparametric or distribution-free methods. We use a lot of rough tools, like jackknifes, bootstraps, cross-tabulations, and visualizations. We like to let the data speak to us instead of trying to fit it in a preconceived model, and we like simple methods that do not require strong assumptions about either the distribution generating the data or our prior knowledge. (loc 4511)

Heteroskedasticity is easily confused with fat tails, or occasional extreme observations. With pure fat tails, the extreme days of the market would be distributed randomly in time, and returns could still be independent. With heteroskedasticity, the extreme moves would be clustered together in time. Financial data showed a bit of both, but a lot more heteroskedasticity than fat tails. (loc 4530)

VaR breaks were another valuable warning. In fact, it's impossible to lose a lot of money quickly unless either VaR goes up or there is a VaR break. (loc 4685)

The third problem with this [historical] VaR estimate that is caused by heteroskedasticity is that the average VaR on break days is $24,100 versus an average VaR on all days of $26,500. That's because your VaR breaks occur disproportionately after calm periods than after volatile ones. (loc 4746)

Take any simple VaR estimate, including either of the two just mentioned. If you get a VaR break, double your VaR estimate for the next day. Call that using a VaR scaling factor of 100 percent, since you're increasing your VaR estimate by 100 percent. Every day you have a VaR break, add one to your VaR scaling factor. Every day you don't have a VaR break, multiply your VaR scaling factor by 0.94. You might object that that's adding two more parameters to the VaR algorithm—the increase in scaling factor on break days and the decrease in scaling factors on nonbreak days. That's true, but I didn't data mine to find perfect parameters. I just doubled on break days, and I used the RiskMetrics decay factor for nonbreak days. Any reasonable set of parameters works about equally well. The important thing is that you need a VaR estimate that reacts violently to any unusual event, and settles down moderately quickly afterward. (loc 4801)

This method accounts for vol clustering (you add to your VaR estimate increasingly).

Most VaR breaks are ordinary days, just with bigger losses. But something like one out of 10 of them are extraordinary events: regime changes, Black Swans, crises, crashes, panics, whatever. (loc 4846)

A proper middle-office risk management stress test does not postulate a situation and compute the loss; it starts from a level of loss and asks what kinds of events could cause it. The loss level is typically set at three to 10 times the VaR amount. (loc 4854)

Stress testing and scenario analysis concentrate on dramatic external events that could harm the firm. But most large losses occur instead from unexpected combinations of events that are not individually unlikely. (loc 4968)

Sometimes outliers are data errors or rare exceptions of minor interest. Sometimes they are far more important than variation within normal data. But it is almost never fruitful to combine outliers and ordinary observations in a single analysis. (loc 5755)

For financial trading applications, the standard process is:

• Estimate a 95 percent one-day value at risk each day before trading begins. You estimate every trading day, even if systems are down or data are missing.
• Compare actual daily profit and loss (P&L) against the VaR prediction when the daily P&L becomes available. Test for the correct number of VaR breaks, within statistical error. Test that the breaks are independent in time and independent of the level of VaR.
• Once you have a reliable VaR system, collect data within the VaR limit. Investigate days when you lose more than the VaR amount, but supplement the observations with hypothetical scenarios and days in the past when your current positions would have suffered large losses.
• On the basis of the previous point's analysis, estimate a left tail of the distribution—that is, the distribution of rare big losses. A power law fit is often appropriate. Don't try to go to the worst possible case; accept a nonzero chance of catastrophic failure. Also on the basis of trans-VaR scenarios, consider risk factors not measured in the P&L. These include leverage risk, liquidity risk, counterparty credit risk, model risk, fraud risk, and others.
• Try to determine the optimal Kelly bet based on the good data you have within the VaR limit, plus the hypothetical left tail you created.
• Try to get up to this level of risk while staying under the levels of leverage, liquidity, counterparty credit, and other risks that could destroy the firm in the identified trans-VaR scenarios. Again, you are not trying for zero probability of failure. (loc 5761)

If your interest is philosophy of statistics, with emphasis on practical implications, you can do no better than Jimmy Savage's great work, The Foundations of Statistics. (loc 6468)

For data analysis, The Jackknife, the Bootstrap, and Other Resampling Plans by Brad Efron is great. Also consider Exploratory Data Analysis by John Tukey. (loc 6474)

Fischer Black wrote a great finance book that almost nobody read, Exploring General Equilibrium (loc 6522)

The standard introduction to quantitative finance is Paul Wilmott Introduces Quantitative Finance by, of course, Paul Wilmott. A few years ago Paul told me he had ceased being a person and had transformed into a brand. Antti Ilmanen wrote an excellent guide to the theory and practice of quant strategies, Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards. More technical works on the subject are Algorithmic Trading and DMA: An Introduction to Direct Access Trading Strategies by Barry Johnson, Inside the Black Box: The Simple Truth about Quantitative Trading by Rishi K. Narang, and Multifractal Volatility: Theory, Forecasting, and Pricing by Laurent E. Calvet. The view of quantitative finance described in Red-Blooded Risk has a lot of overlap with two pathbreaking but eccentric works: The Handbook of Portfolio Mathematics: Formulas for Optimal Allocation & Leverage by Ralph Vince and Finding Alpha: The Search for Alpha When Risk and Return Break Down by Eric Falkenstein. A more famous pathbreaking and eccentric work is Benoit Mandelbrot's The (Mis)behavior of Markets. (loc 6533)

If you like to study your quantitative finance through people, Espen Haug's Derivatives Models on Models is an excellent choice. Also consider The Quants: How a New Breed of Math Whizzes Conquered Wall Street and Nearly Destroyed It by Scott Patterson, My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman, Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in the Global Markets by Steven Drobny, and More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite by Sebastian Mallaby. The Economic Function of Futures Markets by Jeffrey Williams remains after 20 years the only really good account of this subject. (loc 6549)

the classic account of trading is The Education of a Speculator by Victor Niederhoffer. (loc 6561)

A good book for the mathematics of financial risk analysis is Portfolio Risk Analysis by Gregory Connor, (loc 6568)

it's impossible to build an economy where everyone has job opportunities if you don't have massive amounts of reliable, affordable electricity for offices, factories, and call centers. (loc 82)

The world needs to provide more energy so the poorest can thrive, but we need to provide that energy without releasing any more greenhouse gases. (loc 109)

Within a few years, I had become convinced of three things: To avoid a climate disaster, we have to get to zero. We need to deploy the tools we already have, like solar and wind, faster and smarter. And we need to create and roll out breakthrough technologies that can take us the rest of the way. (loc 121)

I know innovation isn't the only thing we need. But we cannot keep the earth livable without it. Techno-fixes are not sufficient, but they are necessary. (loc 220)

There are no realistic paths to zero that involve abandoning these fuels completely or stopping all the other activities that also produce greenhouse gases (like making cement, using fertilizer, or letting methane leak out of natural gas power plants). Instead, in all likelihood, in a zero-carbon future we will still be producing some emissions, but we'll have ways to remove the carbon they emit. (loc 288)

Most of these zero-carbon solutions are more expensive than their fossil-fuel counterparts. In part, that's because the prices of fossil fuels don't reflect the environmental damage they inflict, so they seem cheaper than the alternative. (I'll return to this challenge of pricing carbon in chapter 10.) These additional costs are what I call Green Premiums. (loc 880)
Which zero-carbon options should we be deploying now? Answer: the ones with a low Green Premium, or no premium at all. If we're not deploying these solutions already, it's a sign that cost isn't the barrier. Something else—like outdated public policies or lack of awareness—is stopping us from getting them out there in a big way. (loc 912)

Changing America's entire electricity system to zero-carbon sources would raise average retail rates by between 1.3 and 1.7 cents per kilowatt-hour, roughly 15 percent more than what most people pay now. That adds up to a Green Premium of $18 a month for the average home—pretty affordable for most people, (loc 1071)

transmission and distribution are responsible for more than a third of the final cost of electricity. (loc 1104)

cheap oil and expensive transmission lines aren't the biggest drivers of the electricity Green Premium. The main culprits are our demand for reliability, and the curse of intermittency. (loc 1107)
nighttime intermittency isn't the hardest problem to deal with. The seasonal variation between summer and winter is an even bigger hurdle. (loc 1127)

The model also showed that regional and national approaches to transmission—rather than leaving each state to its own devices—would allow every state to meet the emission-reduction goals with 30 percent fewer renewables than they would need otherwise. In other words, we'll save money by building renewables in the best locations, building a unified national grid, and shipping zero-emissions electrons wherever they're needed. (loc 1219)

even though electricity is only 27 percent of the problem, it could represent much more than 27 percent of the solution. With clean electricity, we could shift away from burning hydrocarbons (which emits carbon dioxide) for fuel. Think electric cars and buses; electric heating and cooling systems (loc 808)

Nuclear fission. Here's the one-sentence case for nuclear power: It's the only carbon-free energy source that can reliably deliver power day and night, through every season, almost anywhere on earth, that has been proven to work on a large scale. (loc 1248)
Nuclear fusion. Although it's still in the experimental phase, fusion holds a lot of promise. Because it would run on commonly available elements like hydrogen, the fuel would be cheap and plentiful. The main type of hydrogen that's usually used in fusion can be extracted from seawater, (loc 1303)

Offshore wind. Putting wind turbines in an ocean or other body of water has various advantages. Because many major cities are near the coast, we can generate electricity much closer to the places where it'll be used and not run into as many transmission problems. Offshore winds generally blow more steadily, so intermittency is less of an issue too. (loc 1322)

Geothermal. Deep underground—as close as a few hundred feet, as far down as a mile—are hot rocks that can be used to generate carbon-free electricity. We can pump water at high pressure down into the rocks, where it absorbs the heat and then comes out another hole, where it turns a turbine or generates electricity some other way. (loc 1340)
In his fantastic 2009 book, Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air, David MacKay estimated that geothermal could meet less than 2 percent of the U.K.'s energy needs, and delivering even that much would require exploiting every square meter of the country and doing the drilling for free. (loc 1344)

The fact that air-conditioning relies so much on electricity makes it easy to calculate the Green Premium for cool air. To decarbonize our air conditioners, we need to decarbonize our power grids. (loc 2393)

Unlike electric cars, which are more expensive to own than their gas-powered counterparts, all-electric heating and cooling lets you save money. And that's true whether you're building new construction from scratch or retrofitting an older home. In most locations, your overall costs will go down if you get rid of an electric air conditioner and gas (or oil) furnace and replace both with an electric heat pump. (loc 2427)

Cheap hydrogen. I hope we get some big breakthroughs in storage. But it's also possible that some innovation will come along and make all these ideas obsolete, the way the personal computer came along and more or less made the typewriter unnecessary. Cheap hydrogen could do that for storing electricity. (loc 1383)
In California, where cars that run on fuel cells are now available, the cost of hydrogen is equivalent to paying $5.60 a gallon for gasoline. So scientists are experimenting with cheaper materials that could serve as electrolyzers. (loc 1398)

Capturing carbon. We could keep making electricity as we do now, with natural gas and coal, but suck up the carbon dioxide before it hits the atmosphere. That's called carbon capture and storage, and it involves installing special devices at fossil-fuel plants to absorb emissions. These "point capture" devices have existed for decades, but they're expensive to buy and operate, they generally capture only 90 percent of the greenhouse gases involved, and power companies don't gain anything from installing them. (loc 1400)

If load shifting is going to have a significant impact, we'll need some changes in policy as well as some technological advances. Utility companies will have to update the price of electricity throughout the day to account for shifts in supply and demand, for instance, and your water heater and electric car will have to be smart enough to take advantage of this price information and respond accordingly. And in extreme cases, when electricity is especially hard to come by, we should have the ability to shed demand, meaning we'd ration electricity, prioritize the highest needs (say, hospitals), and shut down nonessential activities. (loc 1430)

If a genie offered me one wish, a single breakthrough in just one activity that drives climate change, I'd pick making electricity: It's going to play a big role in decarbonizing other parts of the physical economy. (loc 1439)

Making 1 ton of steel produces about 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide. (loc 1538)

concrete is even harder. (Sorry—no pun intended.) To make it, you mix together gravel, sand, water, and cement. The first three of these are relatively easy; it's the cement that is a problem for the climate. To make cement, you need calcium. To get calcium, you start with limestone—which contains calcium plus carbon and oxygen—and burn it in a furnace along with some other materials.
Make a ton of cement, and you'll get a ton of carbon dioxide. (loc 1551)

cement is the toughest case of all. It's hard to get around that simple fact—limestone plus heat equals calcium oxide plus carbon dioxide. (loc 1641)

Clean electricity would help us solve another problem too: making plastics. If enough pieces come together, plastics could one day become a carbon sink—a way to remove carbon rather than emit it. (loc 1659)

To sum up, the path to zero emissions in manufacturing looks like this: Electrify every process possible. This is going to take a lot of innovation. Get that electricity from a power grid that's been decarbonized. This also will take a lot of innovation. Use carbon capture to absorb the remaining emissions. And so will this. Use materials more efficiently. Same. (loc 1674)

We'll also have to do something about deforestation and other uses of land, which together add a net 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere while also destroying essential wildlife habitats. (loc 1704)

As Borlaug's semi-dwarf wheat spread around the world, and as other breeders did similar work on corn and rice, yields tripled in most areas. Starvation plummeted, and today Borlaug is widely credited with saving a billion lives. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and we're still feeling the impact of his work: Virtually all the wheat grown on earth is descended from the plants he bred. (loc 1728)

As people get richer, they eat more calories, and in particular they eat more meat and dairy. And producing meat and dairy will require us to grow even more food. A chicken, for example, has to eat two calories' worth of grain to give us one calorie of poultry—that is, you have to feed a chicken twice as many calories as you'll get from the chicken when you eat it. A pig eats three times as many calories as we get when we eat it. For cows, the ratio is highest of all: six calories of feed for every calorie of beef. In other words, the more calories we get from these meat sources, the more plants we need to grow for the meat. (loc 1736)

Around the world, there are roughly a billion cattle raised for beef and dairy. The methane they burp and fart out every year has the same warming effect as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, accounting for about 4 percent of all global emissions. (loc 1765)
In a process called enteric fermentation, bacteria inside the cow's stomach break down the cellulose in the plant, fermenting it and producing methane as a result. (loc 1760)

When wasted food rots, it produces enough methane to cause as much warming as 3.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. (loc 1821)

When you take a tree out of the ground, you disturb the soil, and it turns out that there's a lot of carbon stored up in soil (in fact, there's more carbon in soil than in the atmosphere and all plant life combined). When you start removing trees, that stored carbon gets released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. (loc 1895)

We're going to need more drinking water than we can supply. As lakes and aquifers shrink or get polluted, it's getting harder to provide potable water to everyone who needs it. Most of the world's megacities already face severe shortages. […]
like so many things, the water problem is ultimately an energy problem: With enough cheap, clean energy, we can make all the potable water we'll ever need.) (loc 2757)

trees in snowy areas cause more warming than cooling, because they're darker than the snow and ice beneath them and dark things absorb more heat than light things do. On the other hand, trees in tropical forests cause more cooling than warming, because they release a lot of moisture, which becomes clouds, which reflect sunlight. Trees in the midlatitudes—between the tropics and the polar circles—are more or less a wash. (loc 1927)

we'll soon need to produce 70 percent more food while simultaneously cutting down on emissions and moving toward eliminating them altogether. It'll take a lot of new ideas, including new ways to fertilize plants, raise livestock, and waste less food, and people in rich countries will need to change some habits—we'll have to eat less meat, for instance.
…

keep these two facts about gasoline in mind: It packs a punch, and it's cheap. They're a good reminder that when it comes to how much energy we get for each dollar we spend, gasoline is the gold standard. Aside from similar products like diesel and jet fuel, nothing else in our daily lives comes close to delivering as much energy per gallon at such a low cost. The twin concepts of energy delivered per unit of fuel and per dollar spent are going to matter a lot as we look for ways to decarbonize our transportation system. As you're (loc 1942)

Although transportation isn't the biggest cause of emissions worldwide, it is number one in the United States, and it has been for a few years now, just ahead of making electricity. We Americans drive and fly a lot. (loc 1981)

Maritime shipping now handles nine-tenths of the goods traded around the world by volume, producing nearly 3 percent of global emissions. (loc 1996)

Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline. In other words, to get the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas, you'll need batteries that weigh 35 times more than the gas. (loc 2143)

Batteries. I've spent way more time learning about batteries than I ever would've imagined. (I've also lost more money on start-up battery companies than I ever imagined.) To my surprise, despite all the limitations of lithium-ion batteries—the ones that power your laptop and mobile phone—it's hard to improve on them. Inventors have studied all the metals we could use in batteries, and it seems unlikely that there are materials that will make for vastly better batteries than the ones we're already building. I think we can improve them by a factor of 3, but not by a factor of 50. (loc 1354)

Pumped hydro. This is a method of storing city-sized amounts of energy, and it works like this: When electricity is cheap (for example, when a stiff wind is turning your turbines really fast), you pump water up a hill into a reservoir; then, when demand for power goes up, you let the water flow back down the hill, using it to spin a turbine and generate more electricity. Pumped hydro is the biggest form of grid-scale electricity storage in the world. Unfortunately, that's not saying much. (loc 1367)

You pump water underground, keep it there under pressure, and then release it when you're ready to turn a turbine. If this approach works, it would be magical, because there would be very little aboveground equipment to worry about. (loc 1375)

Thermal storage. The notion here is that when electricity is cheap, you use it to heat up some material. Then, when you need more electricity, you use the heat to generate power via a heat engine. This can work at 50 or 60 percent efficiency, which isn't bad. Engineers know about many materials that can stay hot for a long time without losing much energy; the most promising approach, which some scientists and companies are working on, is to store the heat in molten salt. (loc 1377)

Climate scientists have identified many tipping points that could dramatically increase the rate at which climate change happens—for instance, if the ice-like crystalline structures containing large amounts of methane on the ocean floor become unstable and erupt. (loc 2791)

Sunlight is absorbed by the earth at a rate of about 240 watts per square meter. There's enough carbon in the atmosphere now to absorb heat at an average rate of about 2 watts per square meter. So we need to make the sun dimmer by 2/240, or 0.83 percent. However, because clouds would adjust to solar geoengineering, we would actually need to dim the sun a bit more, to about 1 percent of the incoming sunlight. If the amount of carbon in the atmosphere doubles, it would absorb heat at a rate of about 4 watts per square meter, and we would need to double the dimming to about 2 percent. (loc 2830)
to compensate for all the warming caused by greenhouse gases we've added to the atmosphere, we need to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the earth by around 1 percent. (loc 2802)

One involves distributing extremely fine particles—each just a few millionths of an inch in diameter—in the upper layers of the atmosphere. Scientists know that these particles would scatter sunlight and cause cooling, because they've watched it happen: When an especially powerful volcano erupts, it spews out a similar type of particle and measurably drives down the global temperature. (loc 2804)

Another approach to geoengineering involves brightening clouds. Because sunlight is scattered by the tops of clouds, we could scatter more sunlight and cool the earth by making the clouds brighter, using a salt spray that causes clouds to scatter more light. (loc 2807)

There are other approaches to geoengineering; they all have three things in common. One, they're relatively cheap compared with the scale of the problem, requiring up-front capital costs of less than $10 billion and minimal operating expenses. Two, the effect on clouds lasts for a week or so, so we could use them as long as we needed to and then stop with no long-term impacts. And three, whatever technical problems these ideas might face are nothing compared with the political hurdles they'll definitely face. (loc 2811)

without some policy intervention—such as a price on carbon, or standards that require a certain volume of zero-carbon electrons in the marketplace—there's no guarantee that the company that invests in sending you clean electrons will actually make money. (loc 2911)

In general, the government's role is to invest in R&D when the private sector won't because it can't see how it will make a profit. Once it becomes clear how a company can make money, the private sector takes over. This is in fact exactly how we got products you probably use every day, including the internet, lifesaving medicines, and the Global Positioning System (loc 2920)

The idea isn't to punish people for their greenhouse gases; it's to create an incentive for inventors to create competitive carbon-free alternatives. By progressively increasing the price of carbon to reflect its true cost, governments can nudge producers and consumers toward more efficient decisions and encourage innovation that reduces Green Premiums. (loc 2941)

In 2005, with an eye on rising oil prices and a desire to import less oil, Congress passed the Renewable Fuel Standard, which set targets for how much biofuel the country would use in the coming years. Simply passing this legislation sent a strong signal to the transportation industry, which invested a lot in the biofuel technology that existed at the time—corn-based ethanol. Corn ethanol was already fairly competitive with gasoline, because gas prices were going up and ethanol producers benefited from a decades-old tax credit. (loc 3007)

Then, in 2007, Congress set out to use biofuels to solve a different problem. Now the concern wasn't just rising oil prices; it was climate change too. The government raised the biofuels targets and in addition required that about 60 percent of all the biofuels sold in the United States be made not from corn but from other starches. (Biofuels made in this way reduce emissions three times more than conventional biofuels.) (loc 3013)

a big reason is that the companies that might produce these biofuels, and the investors who might back them, haven't had any certainty about the market. The executive branch has expected shortfalls in the supply of advanced biofuels, so it keeps lowering the targets. In 2017, the target was dropped from 5.5 billion gallons to 311 million gallons. And sometimes the new targets are announced so late in the year that producers don't know how much they can count on selling. It's a vicious cycle: The government lowers the quota because it expects a shortfall, and the shortfalls keep happening because the government keeps lowering the quota. (loc 3018)

Isn't 2030 a stop on the way to 2050? Not necessarily. Making reductions by 2030 the wrong way might actually prevent us from ever getting to zero. Why? Because the things we'd do to get small reductions by 2030 are radically different from the things we'd do to get to zero by 2050. They're really two different pathways, (loc 3081)

I've divided the different elements of my plan into two categories. These categories will sound familiar if you've taken Economics 101: One involves expanding the supply of innovations—the number of new ideas that get tested—and the other involves accelerating the demand for innovations. The two work hand in hand, in a push-and-pull fashion. Without demand for innovation, inventors and policy makers won't have any incentive to push out new ideas; without a steady supply of innovations, buyers won't have the green products the world needs to get to zero. (loc 3116)

Government policies should be technology neutral (benefiting any solutions that reduce emissions, rather than a few favored ones), predictable (as opposed to regularly expiring and then getting extended, as happens frequently now), and flexible (so that many different companies and investors can take advantage of them, not just those with large federal tax bills). (loc 3230)

Lol – the shade at tesla!

There are markets worth billions of dollars waiting for someone to invent low-cost, zero-carbon cement or steel, or a net-zero liquid fuel. As I've tried to show, making these breakthroughs and getting them to scale will be hard, but the opportunities are so big that it's worth getting out in front of the rest of the world. Someone will invent these technologies. It's just a question of who and how soon. (loc 3411)

In this chapter, I'll propose a plan for how we can avoid a climate disaster, focusing on the specific steps government leaders and policy makers can take. (You can find more detail on each element below at breakthroughenergy.org.) (loc 3072)

The late David MacKay of Cambridge University inspired me with his wit and insights. I recommend his phenomenal book Sustainable Energy—Without the Hot Air to anyone who wants to dig deeper into the subject of energy and climate change. Vaclav Smil, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, is one of the finest systems thinkers I have ever met. His influence on this book is particularly evident in the passages on the history of energy transitions, and in the errors he helped me avoid. (loc 3619)

Molecule for molecule, many of these other gases cause more warming than carbon dioxide does—in the case of methane, 120 times more warming the moment it reaches the atmosphere. But methane doesn't stay around as long as carbon dioxide. (loc 326)

We use carbon dioxide equivalents to account for the fact that some gases trap more heat than carbon dioxide but don't stay around as long. Unfortunately, carbon dioxide equivalents are an imperfect measure: Ultimately, what really matters isn't the amount of greenhouse gas emissions; what matters is the higher temperatures and their impact on humans. And on that front, a gas like methane is much worse than carbon dioxide. It drives the temperature up immediately, and by quite a bit. (loc 329)

Still, there is a lot that scientists do know and can state with confidence about what will happen if we don't get to zero. Here are a few key points. The earth is warming, it's warming because of human activity, and the impact is bad and will get much worse. (loc 372)

Passenger cars represent less than half of all the emissions from transportation, which in turn is 16 percent of all emissions worldwide. (loc 783)

Tip: Whenever you hear "kilowatt," think "house." "Gigawatt," think "city." A hundred or more gigawatts, think "big country." (loc 846)

As for the cost of removing a ton of carbon from the air, that figure hasn't been firmly established, but it's at least $200 per ton. With some innovation, I think we can realistically expect it to get down to $100 per ton, so that's the number I'll use. That gives us the following equation: 51 billion tons per year x $100 per ton = $5.1 trillion per year (loc 947)

It takes a really long time to adopt new sources of energy. Notice how in 60 years coal went from 5 percent of the world's energy supply to nearly 50 percent. But natural gas reached only 20 percent in the same amount of time. (loc 634)
Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there's no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas. (loc 664)
In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three. (loc 666)

As always, the roles one plays become recognizable only with greater maturity. To me, these people seem like children on a playground; I'm amused by their earnestness, and embarrassed to remember myself doing those same things. Their activities are appropriate for them, but I couldn't bear to participate now; when I became a man, I put away childish things. I will deal with the world of normal humans only as needed to support myself. (loc 754)

I'm reminded of the Confucian concept of ren: inadequately conveyed by "benevolence," that quality which is quintessentially human, which can only be cultivated through interaction with others, and which a solitary person cannot manifest. It's one of many such qualities. And here am I, with people, people everywhere, yet not a one to interact with. I'm only a fraction of what a complete individual with my intelligence could be. (loc 821)

All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What can I do with this knowledge? Much of what is conventionally described as "personality" is at my discretion; the higher-level aspects of my psyche define who I am now. I can send my mind into a variety of mental or emotional states, yet remain ever aware of the state and able to restore my original condition. (loc 875)

My mind collapses back into a state of sanity. I must keep a tighter rein over my self. When I'm in control at the meta-programming level, my mind is perfectly self-repairing; I could restore myself from states that resemble delusion or amnesia. But if I drift too far on the meta-programming level, my mind might become an unstable structure, and then I would slide into a state beyond mere insanity. I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range. (loc 945)

Undoubtedly influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising and the metaprogramming circuit.

<Your indifference toward the normals would be justified if you were enlightened; your realm wouldn't intersect theirs. But as long as you and I can still comprehend their affairs, we can't ignore them.> (loc 1042)

He considers intelligence to be a means, while I view it as an end in itself. Greater intelligence would be of little use to him. At his present level, he can find the best possible solution to any problem within the realm of human experience, and many beyond. All he'd require is sufficient time to implement his solution. There's no point in further discussion. By mutual assent, we begin. (loc 1049)

Myself, constructing the simulator. Designing those defense structures gave me the perspective needed to recognize the gestalt.
I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve. (loc 1138)

I love this ending – causing the metaprogramming circuit to design its own Godel Sentence.

Carl shook his head. "Wait a minute. Obviously one and two aren't the same." "But formally they are: the proof's in your hand. Everything I've used is within what's accepted as absolutely indisputable." "But you've got a contradiction here." "That's right. Arithmetic as a formal system is inconsistent." 6b (loc 1294)

"How can you say that? Math still works. The scientific and economic worlds aren't suddenly going to collapse from this realization." "That's because the mathematics they're using is just a gimmick. It's a mnemonic trick, like counting on your knuckles to figure out which months have thirty-one days." "That's not the same." "Why isn't it? Now mathematics has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Never mind concepts like imaginaries or infinitesimals. Now goddamn integer addition has nothing to do with counting on your fingers. One and one will always get you two on your fingers, but on paper I can give you an infinite number of answers, and they're all equally valid, which means they're all equally invalid. (loc 1304)

last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent. (loc 1327)

the only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing. Without that, it's simply not possible. So if you want to learn the aliens' language, someone with training in field linguistics— whether it's me or someone else— will have to talk with an alien. Recordings alone aren't sufficient." (loc 1487)

"In their spoken language, a noun has a case marker indicating whether it's a subject or object. In their written language, however, a noun is identified as subject or object based on the orientation of its logogram relative to that of the verb. Here, take a look." I pointed at one of the figures. "For instance, when 'heptapod' is integrated with 'hears' this way, with these strokes parallel, it means that the heptapod is doing the hearing." I showed him a different one. "When they're combined this way, with the strokes perpendicular, it means that the heptapod is being heard. This morphology applies to several verbs. (loc 1733)

The State Department instructed us to reveal as little as possible about humanity, in case that information could be used as a bargaining chip in subsequent negotiations. We obliged, though it didn't require much effort: the heptapods never asked questions about anything. Whether scientists or tourists, they were an awfully incurious bunch. (loc 1821)

According to Gary, the heptapods' formulation of physics was indeed topsy-turvy relative to ours. Physical attributes that humans defined using integral calculus were seen as fundamental by the heptapods. (loc 1908)

what kind of worldview did the heptapods have, that they would consider Fermat's principle the simplest explanation of light refraction? What kind of perception made a minimum or maximum readily apparent to them? (loc 1917)

"The light can't start traveling in any old direction and make course corrections later on, because the path resulting from such behavior wouldn't be the fastest possible one. The light has to do all its computations at the very beginning." I thought to myself, the ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in. I knew what that reminded me of. I looked up at Gary. "That's what was bugging me." (loc 1987)

As I grew more fluent, semagraphic designs would appear fully formed, articulating even complex ideas all at once. My thought processes weren't moving any faster as a result, though. Instead of racing forward, my mind hung balanced on the symmetry underlying the semagrams. The semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no "train of thought" moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence. (loc 2020)

the Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she'll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled? They can't be, was the common answer. A volume like the Book of Ages is a logical impossibility, for the precise reason that its existence would result in the above contradiction. Or, to be generous, some might say that the Book of Ages could exist, as long as it wasn't accessible to readers: that volume is housed in a special collection, and no one has viewing privileges. The existence of free will meant that we couldn't know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness. Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would? (loc 2091)

I don't think this is a particularly interesting take on free will/predetermination

Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations. The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. (loc 2124)

knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it. (loc 2187)

For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place. (loc 2200)

We are in agreement as to the implication of these findings: that the human species has the potential to exist for only a fixed number of generations, and we are within five generations of the final one." (loc 2626)

He and Dr. Ashbourne had assumed that creating animals capable of reproducing meant giving them preformed foetuses, because that was the method employed by nature. As a result they had overlooked another possibility: that if a creature could be expressed in a name, reproducing that creature was equivalent to transcribing the name. An organism could contain, instead of a tiny analogue of its body, a lexical representation instead. (loc 3192)

Humanity would become a vehicle for the name as well as a product of it. Each generation would be both content and vessel, an echo in a self-sustaining reverberation. (loc 3195)

The wonder of DNA.

Already in his mind Stratton was transposing the letters, searching for a permutation that denoted both the human body and itself, an ontogenic encoding for the species. (loc 3205)

What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans? (loc 3209)

as metahumans began to dominate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish secondhand accounts translated into human language. Without DNT humans could not fully grasp prior developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. (loc 3211)

Textual hermeneutics became popular first, since there were already terabytes of metahuman publications whose translations, while cryptic, were presumably not entirely inaccurate. Deciphering these texts bears little resemblance to the task performed by traditional paleographers, but progress continues: (loc 3219)

The newest and by far the most speculative mode of inquiry is remote sensing of metahuman research facilities. A recent target of investigation is the ExaCollider recently installed beneath the Gobi Desert, whose puzzling neutrino signature has been the subject of much controversy. (The portable neutrino detector is, of course, another metahuman artifact whose operating principles remain elusive.) (loc 3225)

Neil was born with a congenital abnormality that caused his left thigh to be externally rotated and several inches shorter than his right; the medical term for it was proximal femoral focus deficiency. Most people he met assumed God was responsible for this, but Neil's mother hadn't witnessed any visitations while carrying him; his condition was the result of improper limb development during the sixth week of gestation, nothing more. (loc 3250) This is a great opening. One starts to assume that Neil is surrounded by weird hyper-religious people, but it's soon revealed that this is the world the story is set in.

It was an unexceptional visitation, smaller in magnitude than most but no different in kind, bringing blessings to some and disaster to others. In this instance the angel was Nathanael, making an appearance in a downtown shopping district. Four miracle cures were effected: the elimination of carcinomas in two individuals, the regeneration of the spinal cord in a paraplegic, and the restoration of sight to a recently blinded person. (loc 3265)

Nathanael hadn't delivered any specific message; the angel's parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. (loc 3274)

Like every other nondevout person, Neil had never expended much energy on where his soul would end up; he'd always assumed his destination was Hell, and he accepted that. That was the way of things, and Hell, after all, was not physically worse than the mortal plane. It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less; the truth of this was plain for anyone to see on those occasions when Hell manifested itself. (loc 3300)

Perhaps, he thought, it'd be better to live in a story where the righteous were rewarded and the sinners were punished, even if the criteria for righteousness and sinfulness eluded him, than to live in a reality where there was no justice at all. It would mean casting himself in the role of sinner, so it was hardly a comforting lie, but it offered one reward that his own ethics couldn't: believing it would reunite him with Sarah. (loc 3518)

In the past there'd been some doubt as to whether Heaven's light could indeed overcome all the spiritual obstacles to becoming saved. The debate ended after the case of Barry Larsen, a serial rapist and murderer who, while disposing of the body of his latest victim, witnessed an angel's visitation and saw Heaven's light. At Larsen's execution, his soul was seen ascending to Heaven, much to the outrage of his victims' families. Priests tried to console them, assuring them— on the basis of no evidence whatsoever— that Heaven's light must have subjected Larsen to many lifetimes' worth of penance in a moment, but their words provided little comfort. (loc 3576)

To maximize their chances of being in the narrow shaft of Heaven's light, they followed the angel as closely as possible during its visitation; depending on the angel involved, this might mean staying alongside the funnel of a tornado, the wavefront of a flash flood, or the expanding tip of a chasm as it split apart the landscape. Far more light-seekers died in the attempt than succeeded. Statistics about the souls of failed light-seekers were difficult to compile, since there were few witnesses to such expeditions, but the numbers so far were not encouraging. In sharp contrast to ordinary pilgrims who died without receiving their sought-after cure, of which roughly half were admitted into Heaven, every single failed light-seeker had descended to Hell. (loc 3593)

He renounced all his previous anger and ambivalence and desire for answers. He was grateful for all the pain he'd endured, contrite for not previously recognizing it as the gift it was, euphoric that he was now being granted this insight into his true purpose. He understood how life was an undeserved bounty, how even the most virtuous were not worthy of the glories of the mortal plane. For him the mystery was solved, because he understood that everything in life is love, even pain, especially pain. So minutes later, when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation. And God sent him to Hell anyway. (loc 3689)

though it's been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still. That is the nature of true devotion. (loc 3726)

A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin. He or she simply doesn't experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences. (loc 3753)

the foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated. But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul. These old conflicting impulses are rearing their heads again, this time in the calliagnosia debate. (loc 4034)

I'd say the ultimate goal is for calli to be considered the proper way to behave in polite society. People can always disable their calli in private, but the default for public interaction would be freedom from lookism. (loc 4258)
…

As always, the roles one plays become recognizable only with greater maturity. To me, these people seem like children on a playground; I'm amused by their earnestness, and embarrassed to remember myself doing those same things. Their activities are appropriate for them, but I couldn't bear to participate now; when I became a man, I put away childish things. I will deal with the world of normal humans only as needed to support myself. (loc 754)

I'm reminded of the Confucian concept of ren: inadequately conveyed by "benevolence," that quality which is quintessentially human, which can only be cultivated through interaction with others, and which a solitary person cannot manifest. It's one of many such qualities. And here am I, with people, people everywhere, yet not a one to interact with. I'm only a fraction of what a complete individual with my intelligence could be. (loc 821)

All that I once knew theoretically about my mind, I now see detailed explicitly. The undercurrents of sex, aggression, and self-preservation, translated by the conditioning of my childhood, clash with and are sometimes disguised as rational thought. I recognize all the causes of my every mood, the motives behind my every decision. What can I do with this knowledge? Much of what is conventionally described as "personality" is at my discretion; the higher-level aspects of my psyche define who I am now. I can send my mind into a variety of mental or emotional states, yet remain ever aware of the state and able to restore my original condition. (loc 875)

My mind collapses back into a state of sanity. I must keep a tighter rein over my self. When I'm in control at the meta-programming level, my mind is perfectly self-repairing; I could restore myself from states that resemble delusion or amnesia. But if I drift too far on the meta-programming level, my mind might become an unstable structure, and then I would slide into a state beyond mere insanity. I will program my mind to forbid itself from moving beyond its own reprogramming range. (loc 945)

Undoubtedly influenced by Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising and the metaprogramming circuit.

<Your indifference toward the normals would be justified if you were enlightened; your realm wouldn't intersect theirs. But as long as you and I can still comprehend their affairs, we can't ignore them.> (loc 1042)

He considers intelligence to be a means, while I view it as an end in itself. Greater intelligence would be of little use to him. At his present level, he can find the best possible solution to any problem within the realm of human experience, and many beyond. All he'd require is sufficient time to implement his solution. There's no point in further discussion. By mutual assent, we begin. (loc 1049)

Myself, constructing the simulator. Designing those defense structures gave me the perspective needed to recognize the gestalt.
I comprehend the Word, and the means by which it operates, and so I dissolve. (loc 1138)

I love this ending – causing the metaprogramming circuit to design its own Godel Sentence.

Carl shook his head. "Wait a minute. Obviously one and two aren't the same." "But formally they are: the proof's in your hand. Everything I've used is within what's accepted as absolutely indisputable." "But you've got a contradiction here." "That's right. Arithmetic as a formal system is inconsistent." 6b (loc 1294)

"How can you say that? Math still works. The scientific and economic worlds aren't suddenly going to collapse from this realization." "That's because the mathematics they're using is just a gimmick. It's a mnemonic trick, like counting on your knuckles to figure out which months have thirty-one days." "That's not the same." "Why isn't it? Now mathematics has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Never mind concepts like imaginaries or infinitesimals. Now goddamn integer addition has nothing to do with counting on your fingers. One and one will always get you two on your fingers, but on paper I can give you an infinite number of answers, and they're all equally valid, which means they're all equally invalid. (loc 1304)

last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent. (loc 1327)

the only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing. Without that, it's simply not possible. So if you want to learn the aliens' language, someone with training in field linguistics— whether it's me or someone else— will have to talk with an alien. Recordings alone aren't sufficient." (loc 1487)

"In their spoken language, a noun has a case marker indicating whether it's a subject or object. In their written language, however, a noun is identified as subject or object based on the orientation of its logogram relative to that of the verb. Here, take a look." I pointed at one of the figures. "For instance, when 'heptapod' is integrated with 'hears' this way, with these strokes parallel, it means that the heptapod is doing the hearing." I showed him a different one. "When they're combined this way, with the strokes perpendicular, it means that the heptapod is being heard. This morphology applies to several verbs. (loc 1733)

The State Department instructed us to reveal as little as possible about humanity, in case that information could be used as a bargaining chip in subsequent negotiations. We obliged, though it didn't require much effort: the heptapods never asked questions about anything. Whether scientists or tourists, they were an awfully incurious bunch. (loc 1821)

According to Gary, the heptapods' formulation of physics was indeed topsy-turvy relative to ours. Physical attributes that humans defined using integral calculus were seen as fundamental by the heptapods. (loc 1908)

what kind of worldview did the heptapods have, that they would consider Fermat's principle the simplest explanation of light refraction? What kind of perception made a minimum or maximum readily apparent to them? (loc 1917)

"The light can't start traveling in any old direction and make course corrections later on, because the path resulting from such behavior wouldn't be the fastest possible one. The light has to do all its computations at the very beginning." I thought to myself, the ray of light has to know where it will ultimately end up before it can choose the direction to begin moving in. I knew what that reminded me of. I looked up at Gary. "That's what was bugging me." (loc 1987)

As I grew more fluent, semagraphic designs would appear fully formed, articulating even complex ideas all at once. My thought processes weren't moving any faster as a result, though. Instead of racing forward, my mind hung balanced on the symmetry underlying the semagrams. The semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no "train of thought" moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence. (loc 2020)

the Book of Ages must be right, by definition; yet no matter what the Book says she'll do, she can choose to do otherwise. How can these two facts be reconciled? They can't be, was the common answer. A volume like the Book of Ages is a logical impossibility, for the precise reason that its existence would result in the above contradiction. Or, to be generous, some might say that the Book of Ages could exist, as long as it wasn't accessible to readers: that volume is housed in a special collection, and no one has viewing privileges. The existence of free will meant that we couldn't know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness. Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would? (loc 2091)

I don't think this is a particularly interesting take on free will/predetermination

Consider the phenomenon of light hitting water at one angle, and traveling through it at a different angle. Explain it by saying that a difference in the index of refraction caused the light to change direction, and one saw the world as humans saw it. Explain it by saying that light minimized the time needed to travel to its destination, and one saw the world as the heptapods saw it. Two very different interpretations. The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. (loc 2124)

knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it. (loc 2187)

For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place. (loc 2200)

We are in agreement as to the implication of these findings: that the human species has the potential to exist for only a fixed number of generations, and we are within five generations of the final one." (loc 2626)

He and Dr. Ashbourne had assumed that creating animals capable of reproducing meant giving them preformed foetuses, because that was the method employed by nature. As a result they had overlooked another possibility: that if a creature could be expressed in a name, reproducing that creature was equivalent to transcribing the name. An organism could contain, instead of a tiny analogue of its body, a lexical representation instead. (loc 3192)

Humanity would become a vehicle for the name as well as a product of it. Each generation would be both content and vessel, an echo in a self-sustaining reverberation. (loc 3195)

The wonder of DNA.

Already in his mind Stratton was transposing the letters, searching for a permutation that denoted both the human body and itself, an ontogenic encoding for the species. (loc 3205)

What is the role of human scientists in an age when the frontiers of scientific inquiry have moved beyond the comprehension of humans? (loc 3209)

as metahumans began to dominate experimental research, they increasingly made their findings available only via DNT (digital neural transfer), leaving journals to publish secondhand accounts translated into human language. Without DNT humans could not fully grasp prior developments nor effectively utilize the new tools needed to conduct research, while metahumans continued to improve DNT and rely on it even more. (loc 3211)

Textual hermeneutics became popular first, since there were already terabytes of metahuman publications whose translations, while cryptic, were presumably not entirely inaccurate. Deciphering these texts bears little resemblance to the task performed by traditional paleographers, but progress continues: (loc 3219)

The newest and by far the most speculative mode of inquiry is remote sensing of metahuman research facilities. A recent target of investigation is the ExaCollider recently installed beneath the Gobi Desert, whose puzzling neutrino signature has been the subject of much controversy. (The portable neutrino detector is, of course, another metahuman artifact whose operating principles remain elusive.) (loc 3225)

Neil was born with a congenital abnormality that caused his left thigh to be externally rotated and several inches shorter than his right; the medical term for it was proximal femoral focus deficiency. Most people he met assumed God was responsible for this, but Neil's mother hadn't witnessed any visitations while carrying him; his condition was the result of improper limb development during the sixth week of gestation, nothing more. (loc 3250) This is a great opening. One starts to assume that Neil is surrounded by weird hyper-religious people, but it's soon revealed that this is the world the story is set in.

It was an unexceptional visitation, smaller in magnitude than most but no different in kind, bringing blessings to some and disaster to others. In this instance the angel was Nathanael, making an appearance in a downtown shopping district. Four miracle cures were effected: the elimination of carcinomas in two individuals, the regeneration of the spinal cord in a paraplegic, and the restoration of sight to a recently blinded person. (loc 3265)

Nathanael hadn't delivered any specific message; the angel's parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. (loc 3274)

Like every other nondevout person, Neil had never expended much energy on where his soul would end up; he'd always assumed his destination was Hell, and he accepted that. That was the way of things, and Hell, after all, was not physically worse than the mortal plane. It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less; the truth of this was plain for anyone to see on those occasions when Hell manifested itself. (loc 3300)

Perhaps, he thought, it'd be better to live in a story where the righteous were rewarded and the sinners were punished, even if the criteria for righteousness and sinfulness eluded him, than to live in a reality where there was no justice at all. It would mean casting himself in the role of sinner, so it was hardly a comforting lie, but it offered one reward that his own ethics couldn't: believing it would reunite him with Sarah. (loc 3518)

In the past there'd been some doubt as to whether Heaven's light could indeed overcome all the spiritual obstacles to becoming saved. The debate ended after the case of Barry Larsen, a serial rapist and murderer who, while disposing of the body of his latest victim, witnessed an angel's visitation and saw Heaven's light. At Larsen's execution, his soul was seen ascending to Heaven, much to the outrage of his victims' families. Priests tried to console them, assuring them— on the basis of no evidence whatsoever— that Heaven's light must have subjected Larsen to many lifetimes' worth of penance in a moment, but their words provided little comfort. (loc 3576)

To maximize their chances of being in the narrow shaft of Heaven's light, they followed the angel as closely as possible during its visitation; depending on the angel involved, this might mean staying alongside the funnel of a tornado, the wavefront of a flash flood, or the expanding tip of a chasm as it split apart the landscape. Far more light-seekers died in the attempt than succeeded. Statistics about the souls of failed light-seekers were difficult to compile, since there were few witnesses to such expeditions, but the numbers so far were not encouraging. In sharp contrast to ordinary pilgrims who died without receiving their sought-after cure, of which roughly half were admitted into Heaven, every single failed light-seeker had descended to Hell. (loc 3593)

He renounced all his previous anger and ambivalence and desire for answers. He was grateful for all the pain he'd endured, contrite for not previously recognizing it as the gift it was, euphoric that he was now being granted this insight into his true purpose. He understood how life was an undeserved bounty, how even the most virtuous were not worthy of the glories of the mortal plane. For him the mystery was solved, because he understood that everything in life is love, even pain, especially pain. So minutes later, when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation. And God sent him to Hell anyway. (loc 3689)

though it's been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still. That is the nature of true devotion. (loc 3726)

A calliagnosic perceives faces perfectly well; he or she can tell the difference between a pointed chin and a receding one, a straight nose and a crooked one, clear skin and blemished skin. He or she simply doesn't experience any aesthetic reaction to those differences. (loc 3753)

the foundations of our culture were laid in classical Greece, where physical beauty and the body were celebrated. But our culture is also thoroughly permeated by the monotheistic tradition, which devalues the body in favor of the soul. These old conflicting impulses are rearing their heads again, this time in the calliagnosia debate. (loc 4034)

I'd say the ultimate goal is for calli to be considered the proper way to behave in polite society. People can always disable their calli in private, but the default for public interaction would be freedom from lookism. (loc 4258)
…